#etc etc. whatever. do NOT start saying that you heard that tumblrs getting rid of --

[stick-named-figure]

tumblrs like actively making this site bad. like this has been a thing for a while but like. the truncating of reblog chains (can no longer go to a previous reblog for some reason) and also now they're selling domains? i thought this before they started selling domains but i wouldnt be surprised if tumblr got rid of subdomains bc like. they seem to be trying to curtail on it (blogs not having subdomains by default, manually having to set a blog to "custom url" or whatever)

[winter-soldier-vibes]

Reason to Come Back (Bucky Barnes x reader)

Reason to come back

Bucky Barnes x reader

Word count: 3574

Request: "can you do something where seb(or one of his characters)and reader used to date and one day he broke up with her and after a short time he comes up with a new girl(not cheating)and the reader thinks that she’s worthless and not beautiful or good enough and that’s why he broke up with her and tries to be better(you know what to do•_-) and silently suffering etc. and with a happy ending where they get back together"

Warnings: mentions of a breakup, angst, depression, very slight mentions of disordered eating and exercise (very slight, not like most of my other fics), general feelings of worthlessness, angst

Tags: @buckys2thicc @mardema @stucky-on-spiderman @abitgryffindorky @freigeistundanderes @barnesplums @thatfangirl42 @buckfics @babyboibucky 

A/N: I AM SO SORRY TO THE ANON THAT REQUESTED THIS SO LONG AGO AND THAT IT TOOK SO LONG! I don’t even know if they’re still here, I feel so bad. I got an anon request for this fic and I did not know about the inbox for Tumblr accounts until just recently because I’m incompetent. There’s no excuse for me taking so long to write it, but I wanted to even though it’s been 9 months since they sent it. If you’re still here anon, thank you for sticking with me!

NEW NOTE 06/04/21: I rewrote this to be for Bucky as opposed to Sebastian. It is still mostly the same, just reworded in some places. This is meant to take place in reference to the timeline of tfatws and mentions moments from the show. I am referencing “the time he was gone” as the series episode 1-6. I don’t know how much time passed but I assume it was at least a few weeks if not longer (especially between episodes 5 and 6). That’s how I wrote it.

------------------------

It was a quiet night, you under some blankets on the couch watching a movie. There was an empty bowl aside from a few popcorn kernels on the coffee table in front of you, the movie more for background noise than entertainment. You were scrolling through your phone mindlessly, looking for a distraction that would keep you occupied.

Not that it was working too well. There wasn’t much that could distract you from the fact that you were alone.

9 months. You had dated for 9 months. Not that he had been around for much of it. He had been with Sam on an extended mission, and he had been gone for a few weeks. You didn’t know much about the mission, Bucky wasn’t allowed to tell you. For your safety. You understood. It was his job, you knew that, but it could be lonely most of the time. He would call or text you if he could, but he couldn’t compromise his location. You were always happy to hear from him, but it wasn’t the same as when he was around.

You knew this would happen, and you had accepted that. It was hard, but you could manage.

You hadn’t heard from him in a weeks, but you didn’t think much of it. He and Sam must have gotten closer to the answers they had been looking for. You could only hope that he was safe. it took a toll on you, worrying about him, but you had been so happy when he had said he was coming home. But when he walked through the door, he didn’t seem excited at all.

You had wrapped your arms around him, and he had hesitantly hugged you back gently. You had known something was wrong almost immediately, pulling back and trying to meet his eyes. “Babe? Are you okay?”

“We should talk,” he said, struggling to meet your eyes.

You pulled your eyes together with concern. “Yeah, yeah what’s wrong?”

“I, uh… I don’t know if this is gonna work out.”

You shook your head, surprised. “What do you mean? What happened?”

“I just don’t think you and I work with 1,000 miles between us.”

“What?” you said in disbelief. “You’re the one who has to leave and I told you that I’m okay with it, and I am. I never thought you’d be the one with the problem with it.”

“Y/n -”

“We can work this out, Buck. You said it yourself, you don’t normally go away for that long. I’m not going anywhere, I - ”

“I can’t ask you to stay, y/n,” he said, cutting you off. You shut your mouth and shook your head. “Where is this coming from, what happened?” you asked.

He cleared his throat. “I should go.”

“You don’t get to walk away from this like that!” you exclaimed, nearly yelling.

“And I don’t have the right to expect you to wait for months while I’m out trying to save people. I thought it’d be fine but I couldn’t stop thinking about you here, alone. There’s going to be more missions, more danger. They recreated the serum. Who knows what else they’ll be able to create? You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

“You don’t get to make that choice for me! I told you I’m okay with it and I still am, Bucky! I know the risks!” you said, tears pricking your eyes.

He looked away. “You deserve much better than me. Someone who can be there for you.”

You walked up to him and cupped his face. “You’re all I could ever want Bucky. Distance be damned.”

He sighed and pulled you into a hug, squeezing you tightly for a moment. “I have to go y/n. I’m sorry.”

He let you go and turned around, not even looking back to say goodbye.

That had been a couple of weeks ago. You had been crushed at first, devastated. But you were still able to function in your day-to-day life. You had a few friends to hype you up or cry with you, whatever the day was. You were able to still get to work, try to move on. And it was getting better, but the nights were still hard. It wasn’t the same when you knew he wouldn’t be coming home.

During the day you could pretend like you were waiting for that night when he would be able to call you. But at night, it was dark and you didn’t have a person you wanted to call.

You weren’t bitter, in a way you understood. You had known how relationships could be ruined by distance and work. But being a super soldier wasn’t a typical line of work. You had been okay with it, but you hadn’t thought that it would’ve affected Bucky as much as it seemed to. You had been emotional at the time, but looking back on it you could understand where he was coming from. Relationships were two-sided - just because you felt okay didn’t guarantee he was.

You knew what he did was dangerous. You had accepted that there might not have always been a happy ending. Maybe he hadn’t.

But then one day you had walked into a bar, only to see Bucky flirting with another girl, laughing away..

That was all you needed to see.

You didn’t want to read too much into it, any kind of situation could be misread. But him laughing with a very attractive girl over drinks shortly after becoming single - you couldn’t help but wonder.

You tried to tell yourself that it didn’t matter, that you were reading everything wrong, but your heart still felt as though it was breaking.

She was gorgeous. Much more so than you, you had thought.

Was that why he left? Was he just wanting to get himself back out there? Had he met her and just needed to get rid of you?

You didn’t want to think that way, none of it was true. He wouldn’t do that, he was a good man. But still…

Maybe if you were different it would’ve been harder for him to leave.

Maybe you hadn’t given him a good enough reason to stay.

And maybe, if you were better, prettier, he would come back.

It started small - making more of an effort to go to the gym, not ordering takeaways every night, that sort of thing. Not that you had much of an appetite to begin with. But you didn’t realize when your days had become full of going from work to the gym, nor why you had freaked out so much when you had sprained an ankle and couldn’t do your normal workout.

You had decided to work your arms those next few days to supplement the cardio you had missed. You had kept this up until you woke up one morning struggling to turn over because you were so sore. You decided that that day, you could take a rest day.

A rest day turned into a rest week, and soon enough you were only leaving your house to go to work. And only because you needed money.

You had cut yourself off from most of your contacts, still replying every now and then so they wouldn’t be concerned. You didn’t go out with them or call them because you were worried they would see right through you. Better to stay home. Your bed would never judge you.

You had become familiar with the spots on the wall, the streaks from god knows what, the way that light would filter through your window as the sun ascended and descended the sky. Hours could pass and you could still be in the same position.

You had to keep up a front around everyone. Letting people know how much you were hurting was not an option for you. Then they would ask what was wrong and pull you aside and look at you with this concerned face that you couldn’t deal with. It was the one that everyone always gave when someone was having a bad day, the one people put on when they wanted you to think that they cared. Sometimes they did, but most of the time a person with any sense of morals would put that face on to make a person think that they cared. It’s the same way “How are you?” is more of a greeting than a genuine question.

There were people who cared, but you didn’t want to have that conversation. You didn’t even know what you were doing anymore. It was an honest thought of bettering yourself, but it was for the wrong reasons. Trying to be better for Bucky made you realize how much you missed him. How angry you really were at him. But you couldn’t take it out on him, he didn’t deserve that at all, he didn’t earn that. But you were angry at...something, and maybe it was yourself, at letting him walk out that door, of not calling him and leaving him messages. Maybe if you had fought for him he would’ve stayed. If you had said something when he distanced himself.

You felt like this was your fault. And maybe if you changed something about yourself, you would learn from your mistakes.

Not that you knew exactly what you had done or what isolating yourself would fix, or teach you for that matter.

At some point, you must have fallen asleep because your ringtone jolted you awake. You groaned, shutting your eyes again. You would let it go to voicemail, just like all of the others. If it was that important they would text you.

You let it ring, sighing when it had stopped. You readjusted in your bed, trying to fall back asleep. It was a Saturday morning, you had until Monday morning to sleep. You were going to make the most of it.

But then your phone began ringing again.

You opened your eyes again, picking up your phone to see who it was. You dropped the phone when you saw the name

Bucky Barnes

Why the fuck was he calling you? What could he possibly have to say to you?

You watched the phone ring through to voicemail, soon after seeing a voicemail was left. You didn’t bother listening to it, you didn’t need to. You simply rolled over in bed. If it were that important, he would have called sooner.

Bucky’s POV

As the call went to voicemail again, Bucky was confused. He had never known you to miss a call, ever. It wasn’t like you, he knew you would drop anything to take calls. You had said you hated people leaving voicemails because you hated them having to listen to your voicemail message. You had thought your voice had sounded weird. It was one of the little things he remembered about you that made him smile

And realize how royally he had fucked up.

Being away on a mission wasn’t anything new for him, but maintaining a serious relationship for him was. He had never met anyone like you, and he had missed you so much when he had left. He hadn’t felt anything like what he did when you smiled at him since the 40′s. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but all he could think about was how much he had missed you. And that made him think about how much you must have missed him.

He felt like he was holding you back in some way. He was used to being away in dangerous situations for periods of time but you weren’t. And no matter how much you had assured him that you were okay with the long-distance relationship, as the months went on he felt guilty for not being able to be there in the way that he wanted to.

In the way you deserved.

He broke up with you because he thought you deserved better than relying on phone calls and texts for months at a time. Someone who could be there all the time for you. Someone who you didn’t have to worry about getting shot when he left for a mission. Someone predictable and reliable. Something he couldn’t always do.

But God, did he miss you.

He regretted walking out that door. He regretted not giving you a better reason, for not calling you or texting you until now, weeks later. The more time went on, the more he felt it would be inappropriate to call you to apologize.

But he couldn’t take it anymore, so he dialed your number. And when it went to voicemail, he had gotten a little worried.

He knew he didn’t have much of a right or reason to be worried, but he had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. So, he decided to reach out to one of your friends.

Hey, is y/n alright?

Why do you want to know?

Look, I know I messed up. I just wanted to apologize and give her the answer she deserves. But she’s not answering my calls.

She doesn’t do phone calls anymore.

What do you mean?

She won’t answer calls. She won’t even come out with us anymore. Something’s up but she denies it.

When did this start?

When do you think?

Bucky’s heart sank to his stomach. This was his fault. And he had to go make it right.

Your POV

You were still in bed, wondering why Bucky had called you. It didn’t make sense to you, for him to call after all of this time. What could he possibly have to say to you? Did he want to inform you of a new girlfriend before the news caught wind of it? Did he want to come up with some dumb excuse to tell you he was sorry?

It made you scoff slightly, but the tug at your heart let you know that it wouldn’t be unwelcome.

You couldn’t deny it. As much as his leaving had hurt you, you missed him more than anything.

You wanted another chance with him, one that you weren’t sure you would get. And the thought of him coming back to you was comforting. Like maybe it wasn’t your fault. Or maybe you had done enough to win him back.

Wishful thinking.

You had lost track of time, once again, but were snapped out of your daze by knocking on your door.

What? Why would anyone be here?

You sighed. It was probably just some random person selling some random product or something.

More knocking. More insistent. You sighed, standing up and silently groaning at the soreness you felt in your body. Not necessarily from overuse, but more so from underuse. You stood you slowly, walking quietly over to your door.

More knocking.

You made it to the door and glanced through the peephole you had, eyes widening and a small gasp leaving your mouth.

Why the fuck was Bucky here?

More knocking.

You ran a hand down your face. Knowing him, he wouldn’t leave. But why did it go from calling straight to ‘I’m coming to your door’? As if he hadn’t been the one to leave you?

More knocking.

You swallowed dryly. “Why are you here?” you called out through the door.

Bucky let out a breath. “I just want to talk to you”

You shook your head on the other side of the door, wondering if you should let him speak. As if he wasn’t already living rent-free in your mind.

“Please y/n.”

You set your face hard, pulling the door open. At least you would get to say your piece to him.

“Now you wanna talk? Fine. Let’s talk.” you said, coldly.

Bucky was slightly taken aback, though he couldn’t blame you. He took in your appearance, exhaustion seeming to overtake you. Dark circles under your eyes, pale skin, you just - all life seemed to be drained from you. He scratched the back of his neck nervously before he asked quietly, “Can I come in?”

You stepped to the side, silently allowing him in, closing the door behind you. You crossed your arms over your chest and shrugged slightly. “What do you want Barnes?

“I’m sorry,” he said. You scoffed slightly, shaking your head and looking away. “Y/n look at me, please. I fucked up.”

“Well it took you long enough to figure that one out didn’t it?” you snapped, looking at him.

“Y/n please -”

“Tell me, when exactly did you figure out that maybe, just maybe, you should say you were sorry?”

“Y/n please - “

“Who was the girl? The one in the bar from a few days after we had broken up? The one you were hitting on over a couple of drinks?”

“The… what?”

“When did you feel the slightest bit of regret? When did you change your mind and decide that you didn’t want to leave?”

“I never wanted to leave you!” he exclaimed. “Can you please just listen to me?”

You looked at him, anger in your eyes but you closed your mouth. You gave him a look that said ‘I’m listening.’

He took a deep breath. “The woman at the bar was an old friend of Sam’s. He had introduced the two of us at one point. I was at a bar one night and and she came over to say hello and stayed for one drink. It’s nothing more than that.”

You took a breath. Situations could definitely be read wrong. You knew it had probably been nothing.

“When we first got together we had talked about me leaving for missions. Long-distance, unpredictable times, dangerous missions. A lot of people have a hard time keeping that going.”

“And I knew that and was okay with it.”

“Let me finish, please.” he pleaded. “I knew you knew the risks but I’m not sure I was as ready as I thought I was. I left and suddenly I couldn’t talk to you because I was worried for your safety. I couldn’t be there for you in all the ways I wanted to be. In all the ways you deserved. I just...you didn’t deserve that. You deserved so much more than that.”

You felt tears prick your eyes. “You already told me that. When you left. What’s really going on?”

He shook his head slightly. “ Sam’s sister had gotten a call with a threat towards her and her children. I couldn’t put you at risk. These people, they were super soldiers just like me. I had a few close calls with serious injuries. And I realized that if I got hurt I couldn’t protect you. I couldn’t let you get hurt and I couldn’t let you worry about whether or not I would come home alive. I thought… I thought it’d be less painful for both of us if we stopped seeing each other before that happened.”

You shook your head slightly. “Why couldn’t you tell me that?” you said, a little more softly.

“I don’t know”

You shook your head. “You’re gonna have to do a lot better than I don’t know.”

“I - “ He sighed slightly. “I was scared. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I was scared that I was going to lose you.”

“So you gave me up?” you asked.

“And made the biggest mistake of my entire life.”

You looked to the side and bit your lip slightly. “You know I thought it was my fault?” you turned your face back to Bucky’s confused one. “I thought I wasn’t good enough for you. That if I was enough you wouldn’t have left. Or if I was better you would’ve come back.”

He shook his head and started walking towards you to comfort you. “It was never your fault angel -”

You backed up slightly. “You don’t get to call me that. Not right now, not yet at least.”

He looked hurt slightly, but he nodded. After a few moments of silence, you scoffed slightly.

“You know, as much as I hate to admit it, I fell apart these past few weeks. Told myself that the only thing I wanted and needed was having you come back. And here you are and...I don’t know, Bucky.” you shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or think, you broke up with me because you were afraid of hurting me? I - “ you rubbed your eyes. “I just… I get it, but I just wish we could’ve had this conversation weeks ago, Buck.”

“Does this mean we’re done?” he asked timidly.

“I… I don’t know. I just…. I think i need a little bit of time. Please. Just some time to think.”

He nodded, though he looked slightly disappointed. “Yeah, of course.” you nodded, walking him over to the door, opening it. He turned around. “Is it okay to give you a hug, y/n?”

You thought about it for a moment before nodding, letting him wrap his arms around your waist as you looped them around his neck. You closed your eyes and took a deep breath, tears forming in your eyes as you realized how much you missed this. How much you needed this. When he went to pull away, you held him a little more tightly before letting him go.

He smiled at you before turning to leave. “Take as much time as you need, y/n.”

You gave him the smallest of smiles back. “I’ll see you later Bucky.”

And with that, you closed the door behind you, not having a clue what any of this meant. This didn’t make it okay by any means, but maybe, just maybe, the two of you could start fresh. Together.

[pluvillion]

i know i barely write here but i guess it's fine because there's really nothing much to write anyways. i'm not going to school (pandemic yup yup), nothing dramatic is happening - every day is the same as the last. i got a Logitech G29 as my birthday present, i graduated high-school, and that's about it.

however, there IS one thing that happened: i got accepted to a university - my alma mater to be exact. and it's not here in Puerto Princesa, it's in Lipa City.

yes, you heard that right. i am set to leave my province to attend college at Lipa City.

let me reiterate just in case the one above was too vague for it to sink in: i am moving out of Palawan and will live in Lipa City for college. it's the whole "moving out" trope found in countless stories, but this time I am doing it with my mother, my brother, and my grandparents. i am ACTUALLY doing the thing that i've been wanting to do since i was a kid!

i remember that 5th grade artwork i did on that 1/2 (was it?) illustration board with my name's acronyms and stuff. i suck at illustrating back then but there was a small house on the lower right and buildings and shit in the distance. in the middle was a car travelling to the city on the road that connected both locations. i was depicting us moving out of the house as a family and onto Manila (hence the buildings). i've always wanted to live the ACTUAL city life (not the one here as it's too "small" to even be considered as a legit city) like my friends and people in social media did.

i've waited and waited and waited for that moment to come, but it didn't arrive. a lot of shit already happened since then. it's never too late, of course, because it actually DID happen, and it was ME who caused it (/pos).

it's surreal to me that within a snap, we're set to leave and live a brand new life in a new place. no one knows us there (except for a few relatives) so i guess it's my chance to be who i've always wanted to be without shittons of relatives trying to pinpoint what i'm exactly doing because "it's not what we remembered you to be when you were a kid". a fresh restart, y'know? if i was unconfident to hell and back here in Puerto Princesa, i sure as shit won't be in Lipa. i'll make sure to lose enormous amount of weight and get rid of this balloon in my stomach so i can style myself without looking like a fatass. yeah i know being skinny is normalized here a lot but honestly i personally prefer being AT LEAST physically fit - i'm addicted to clothes like how i am to cars, i just don't have the money to buy the exact clothes i wanted (at least i can get around with cars via videogames which is a huge plus).

i know we still have a long way to go before we leave (hopefully by next year the pandemic eases instead of worsens), but if i managed to wait, say, 8-9 years to move places, then it won't hurt to wait another year more. besides, we're finally getting our fiber wifi so i can now do whatever i couldn't back when we still had the shitty wifi from Globe (thought i'd put that out haha)

i guess it's finally time for me to start counting down the days before going back to Manila? like i've said above, this won't be a returning trip; once we leave, there's no going back - i'm staying there until for good for a few years. i just hope fate doesn't have anything deadly prepared for me because i'd be paranoid if i had one... i still have dreams to pursue. who knows, maybe i'll do better to the point where i'll leave the country for school? time will tell.

anyways, i have been trying to post this shit since a few days ago but Tumblr won't let me because it's only JUST NOW where my brain started going haywire with my thoughts that a simple "talking to the air" won't do the trick.

besides, at least i have something to read back to when i finally move to Lipa. i can read all the stuff that happened during our final months of stay here in Palawan, the thoughts i had that i chose to write instead of letting the wind hear it, and reminisce what i could remember during the time i wrote a note because i know FOR SURE i'll be homesick when i get there. even just thinking about it makes me homesick already, and we haven't even left yet.

fun fact: it's the same thing i did back when dad announced we'll be visiting him in December 23rd. the moment he told us we'll be going to Manila at December 3rd, i made an oath to write all the shit i can write so when the day arrives, i have something to read in the plane. another fun fact: i actually did. i even wrote a letter to my future self because i'm extra like that.

now i just got accepted four days ago, so that means i can still build this journal the way i like it until the day we go back to Puerto Princesa, we ride a plane to Manila and a roadtrip to Lipa where I'll be staying at together with my mom, brother, and my grandparents for college for around four years or so.

i still can't believe i'm saying this for real. i usually only do shit like this as an imagine to get my excitement meter high but just enough so i don't disappoint myself because it won't really happen. i guess manifesting really does work haha.

that said, our wifi's finally getting connected tomorrow or two, my brother will get his own laptop so i can finally use mine again that he basically worn down (a broken hinge, one part of the monitor's casing had no glue anymore, etc.), and i think i'm gonna get both Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5.

also yeah, i'm definitely gonna be active on Tumblr even just for a short while. i know college is no joke.

[morgansyorkie]

We are really out here trying to “cancel” someone over a fucking ig post that may or may not have been liked!! (I say that because some say that his like comes up and some say his like doesn’t whatever) BUT ARE WE FUCKING FOR REAL RIGHT NOW!! Good fucking luck trying to do that. I’m about to get real for a second and if you don’t approve or like what i have to say than so be it, block or unfollow me. But listen up, knock if off with the unnecessary drama, this doesn’t concern you or anyone else for that matter. Nolan didn’t do a damn thing wrong, he is allowed to have his own opinions about certain things and he doesn’t need to please anyone of you either. He is allowed to post and like whatever he wants to on HIS SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT! (key word here is HIS not YOURS but HIS) i highly doubt that every little thing he does when it comes to instagram he is thinking oh no i shouldn’t like this or that or post this or that because the tumblr and twitter world might cancel me, he can give two fucks what any of us thinks, as along as it not hurting his family, friends, etc he doesn’t care (none of us care what we do on social media) Sorry to say it but this is the real world here people everyone is going to have different opinions on certain matters. ALSO WE DONT EVEN KNOW IF ITS HIM WHO THE GC WAS REFERING TO! So again, we don’t know the moral of the story nor do we need to, it doesn’t concern any of us. Holy shit please stop trying to poke and pride into people’s lives and business when it fucking doesn’t concern you! Honestly go get a damn hobby and life, go read a book, go make a TikTok i don’t know but stop trying to “cancel” people for fucks sake. You’re making yourself look ridiculous and stupid here sorry to say it. It also makes people like myself and others who follows Nolan for the sake of the game and his playing more so than his “looks” want to bash our heads into a wall and scream our lungs out! Like get out of dreamland and realize that no one is perfect, that we all make mistakes and have flaws! Secondly, Nolan is one of the most kind hearted souls that you will ever interact with or meet in your life. He is the real deal, he doesn’t try to put on a front for anyone. Lastly, if you wanna “cancel” him than so be it because he doesn’t need the support from “fans” like you anyways. Now you wanna know why celebs, athletes and basically anyone who has a name to themselves want to keep their lives private or want to get rid of their social media accounts, it’s because of people like you who again poke and pride too much into their lives, again just let them be. He is allowed to live his life they way he wants to and if your gonna judge and hate him on something that might not have anything to do with him than shame on you!! He deserves love and support from fans who are going to be with him through thick and thin, he is battling a lot right now so he doesn’t need this shit or need to be attacked for no apparent reason. Stop causing unnecessary drama, just because you want to start something and want your 15 seconds of fame or want a name to yourself or because you wanna be heard. At the end of the day his main concern is to get onto the ice with his team mates and play the sport that he loves so much again! That’s all I’m gonna say...so take it as you want to!

[shijiujun]

history3 ep10 summary - POOR SHAO FEI AND TANG YI BB, this is what heartbreak looks like

I JUST ABOUT DIED. I DID. THE LAST PART WAS MAD - just this 30 seconds alone carried the entire fucking episode

We are at the halfway mark - Part of me doesn’t want it to end at all but I need to see the birthday cake and domestic scenes ASAP!! Currently I’m just enjoying the ride and so glad we get to see Chris and Jake and Andy and Kenny and everyone of those other hot and excellent actors in this show. I’ve never done a GIF or subtitled in all my years on tumblr before History3 - life changing this is what this show is and I’m so happy we’re all doing this together! Let’s make it through the halfway mark together omgosh excited guys!!!!!

Shopping scene with Shao Fei + Hong Ye: Hong Ye is telling SF to walk faster they go into a department store and she keeps changing clothes OMG LOL THEY ARE SO CUTE TGT!!! She wears smth with ruffles and then asks SF how it looks and then he’s like ‘why do u look like a seaweed’ and she’s like ‘who’s a seaweed you’re a seaweed’ and then she dances LOL and then LOL HE FELL ASLEEP WHILE SHOPPING WITH HER AND LOST HER omg Shao Fei seriously

They’re playing a game on the escalator this is the funniest shit and OF COURSE she brings him to a lingerie shop and omg Shao Fei so poor thing just sits there and OMG YAS HONG YE SISTER-BROTHER RIVALRY and she buys him UNDERWEAR and she’s like “hang on a second, this is too big for you, you need a smaller one” LOL BURN

Carpark/shooting scene: They’re almost like friends or something, although later after we see the hong ye and bodyguard ah de scene you’ll realise why she was speaking to shao fei like that (because she knew smth was going to happen and she thought everything was going to go to plan but who knew they were coming with guns) and anw, then the bullets start going off and shao fei protects her with all of his body like OH MY GOD - And wow the angle of the shot and how it struck SF is totally wrong and omggg this scene was faster than I thought JESUS CHRIST - is it just me or did Shao Fei get hit on the wrong side? Either they missed a scene or the bullet came from elsewhere

and then we get the scene of tang yi storming into the hospital and he goes straight for hong ye first, hugs her as she cries etc. and then hot doctor is there and when hot doctor is NOT SMILING  YOU KNOW SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN - anyway, the nurse tells hot doctor that the surgery has been prepped, and then hot doctor nods and says ‘let’s go’ - and that’s when tang yi REMEMBERS AND LOOKS UP - “is that for meng shao fei?” And his look of absolute regret is ridiculous

and hot doctor just somberly nods 

Police chief STILL DOESNT KNOW THAT SHAO FEI HAS BEEN SHOT omg he’s going around doing his usual shit and everyone is clearing shit with him and fuck he misses shao fei so much I like that they finally show that shao fei is useful in the office and everyone is dependent on him and then suddenly Yu Qi turns up because she somehow got the call that shao fei is in the hospital

Oh goddddd Tang Yi’s face as he sits there AND LOL Dao yi (glasses guy) knows police chief quite well he called him Brother Bao, and tells him to calm down and they will take care of everything but POLICE CHIEF AINT HAVING NONE OF THAT BULLSHIT he pushes dao yi aside and this is one of the only times he can legit grab a mob boss by the neck and not get shot at after - police chief loves Shao Fei so much you can tell he totally lost it and Hong Ye genuinely feels bad and she’s saying sorry over and over to him as tang yi sits there catatonic - tang yi is totally quiet

also not sure if you guys caught it but the older guy in the investigative team, the one who always kind of says smth subtly bad about shao fei, he shot a look to bodyguard ah de when police chief was confronting tang yi in the hospital - they are totally up to something, corrupt police!!!!

The rest of the investigative team - LOL Zhao zi: “wow I’ve never seen police boss chief grab someone so much larger than him by the neck” - Yu Qi really likes Shao Fei, she’s crying by herself at the stairs and police chief is the one who’s standing by Shao fei’s door the moment he’s out of surgery and he scoffs “what ‘they’ll take care of everything’? the moment they heard shao fei was going to pull through they all left’- he tells zhao zi that they’ll start investigating who the fuck was behind the shooting and reminds them all to be careful

Captain Shi: “those who dare to touch any one from the investigative team, I’ll bring them all back to the police station!!!!”

OMG WE GET THE SCENE WHERE TANG YI IS HOTLY WALKING AND RIPPING OFF HIS JACKET AND OH JESUS CHRIST BRASS KNUCKLES?!!! Anw here’s the gem oh my god: Tang yi comes in where the culprit is already seated and he tells everyone to get the fuck out (OMG YOU KNOW HE MEANS BUSINESS) 

Ah De is like ‘boss, this is a small thing, let me do it’ - and he’s so damn insistent on interrogating the culprit himself even though tang yi is literally ready to set fire on the bitch you know and i’m like AH DE THAT IS SO NOT SMART YOU WANNA DIE?!

and well, we all called it - tang yi hears that and he’s like wtf and he gets mad, hauls bodyguard ah de off his feet and slams him against the wall and yells: “SMALL THING?! HE TOUCHED MY PEOPLE, AND YOU CALL IT A SMALL THING?!”

and bodyguard is like fuckkkk: “yes i’m sorry boss, i said the wrong thing, i’ll leave now”

and then he goes out and hovers by the door while tang yi puts on his brass knuckles and starts punching the dude who is yelling a bit like... not realistically HAHAHAHA - and omg Jack hit it right on the nail, he asked Brother De why he looks so worried and ‘jokingly’ asks, “why, do u know the person inside?” And Brother De is so angry and defensive - jack totally knows what is up

Brother de and Hong Ye meet up and here we find out that they ordered the hit on shao fei in a sense to get rid of him - they wanted to show tang yi that shao fei can’t protect anyone and then chase him away, but they were supposed to come teach shao fei a lesson with like wooden sticks and not guns - hong ye was a bit stunned by that as well and she asked ah de like wtf did you really want to kill me?! and ah de is like confused also, he doesn’t really know how the plan went wrong?! and hong ye is like, whatever, i will cooperate with you only up to here, if tang yi manages to get any answers, it’s all on you (like not cool hong ye, tang yi would totes forgive you if you just admitted it i think)

anyway, switch to the balcony scene with tang yi and jack, where jack asks who it was that ordered the hit, and tang yi says: “chen wen hao”

okay so my theory is that maybe chen wen hao really has smth to do with this - he kind of derailed the plan and changed it to legitly wanting to kil hong ye and shao fei (more hong ye than shao fei more likely) - but right now they dont know it they just think that they’re safe and their story checks out

Okay so Hong Ye and Dao Yi - Gosh she’s kind of a brat but I get where she’s coming from. anyway she leaves brother de and then dao yi is waiting for her in the carpark - the man knows he way better than she knows herself, and i think he knows that she had something to do with the shooting, but he didn’t say anything except to hint that she better leave shao fei up to tang yi and stop trying to interfere. hong ye is adamant that shao fei is a different kind of person from them, and dao yi is like: “that’s for the boss to decide. the way he treats him... shao fei is different to him”

OH MY GOD THANK YOU SOMEONE SAYING IT AS IT IS FINALLY NO MORE SUBTLE LOOKS AND SMILES SOMEONE SAID IT

and anw, hong ye manages to make this entire thing about her and how dao yi doesn’t love her - sister, i really get you and dao yi really needs to get his shit together, but srsly, a man just got shot for you because you were unhappy with his presence - and gosh unrequited (actually requited) love, but i get her in this part

but seriously, i get that she want shao fei out of the way but they way she did it was totally wrong, does she not know that tang yi is soft for him and cares for him like he has no one else before? she was willing to hurt him to make a point, and then ah de is - gosh dude get a grip

AND OMGGGGGG TANG YI’S FACE AS HE IS BY SHAO FEI’S BEDSIDE - this is what heartbreak looks like guys, he looks like he’s saying goodbye and his fucking expression - wow Chris did a fucking good job he totally looks heartbroken and as if shao fei died or smth, he’s holding his hand and air-tracing his nose and he looks like he’s going to cry - HE REALLY LOVES HIM GUYS - the emotion was really right on point

(and lol the chinese audience - they were scolding tang yi during the first part of the ep because he didn’t seem to have much of a reaction to shao fei’s injury and then when the last part came everyone went BATSHIT CRAZY)

what the fuck is going to happen next episode? i ask, but i know already - tang yi is getting ready to say goodbye to shao fei and push him away because he realised how dangerous it is for shao fei to be around him BUT OUR FAVE CHARACTERS WILL FIND SOME WAY TO BE TOGETHER AGAIN NO WORRIES I DOUBT THEIR BREAKUP WILL LAST MORE THAN AN EP

[notesonleaves]

update (after a yr)

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted here. I’ve simply gotten out of the habit of blogging on Tumblr, mostly because I post on Discord and other fora these days, but now that Tumblr has banned a lot of content (while continuing to run poorly in many ways), the platform seems to be declining in earnest. In any case, here’s some books/tv shows/whatever that I’ve been watching:  

Houseki no Kuni (anime):  This is really worth seeing because it does CG animation fairly well (especially with the sense of space and action scenes), and it’s nice to see the characters in color. Would be great to have a sequel, especially when the manga is finished, although given the glacial pace, that will be awhile. 

Advisors Alliance (season 1, up to episode 30 or so):  I watched this on my own up until episode 20 or so and am now rewatching and beyond in a fairly leisurely way with a friend. I’d like to watch the second season if I can figure out how to find it. (The first season is on Youtube). Wish I spoke Chinese (or even read it, given that there are Chinese subtitles). The other thing which really gets me is that although the real title also adds that it’s about the great military advisor, Sima Yi, he uh, in the first season does not seem to do much military advising at all, other than going on a diplomatic mission to convince Sun Quan to ally with Cao Cao so they can get rid of Guan Yu. Which is not a small thing, but I think it gives a misleading impression of what the show is about, especially when a major subplot is civil service hiring reform (whee!). 

Cells at Work (anime):  If you’ve ever wanted to watch a pretty fluffy show about, surprisingly, mainly the immune system, this is the anime for you! Not much to say about it otherwise. 

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (book):  An enjoyable exercise in sophistry/trolling. The philosophical author concludes that all books, including the ones we have actually read, are books that we haven’t read. Given that is true, this book is really how to talk about all books. 

Crazy Rich Asians trilogy:  This was better than I expected, since the author clearly loves Trollope and other 19th century comedy of manners sorts of books and is trying his hand at writing a modern version. It suffers from the common flaw (?) of these books that the main characters are often the most boring, especially since the real point is to do these small portraitures of the various types of insane wealthy folk. (Astrid and Kitty have better stories, I feel) The writing feels more convincing when he focuses on Singapore itself, rather than the other settings. 

A Court of Thorns and Roses (trilogy):  This was worse than I expected. When I read these I wanted to write a blog entry about them, but I never got around to them. I started to read them because I was intrigued by one of the plot developments I’d read about. This series is either YA or Adult Fantasy, depending on which country it is published and who you ask, and some aspects of the early story remind me of the hunting scenes in the Hunger Games, but much of that is swept away later in favor of it becoming a big epic fantasy series set in fairyland. What is wrong with these books? I am not entirely sure. I think it’s partially the prose, and partially that the writer has good ideas but fails on the structure and execution, and a lot of the endless beautiful and powerful fairies etc. is harder to pull off than it looks. Many of the plot important scenes feel perfunctory and unconvincing, although the more fairy tale like scenes often are pretty effective. I feel like someone out the probably has written something that does explain what are the problem(s) but I can’t find the post. 

The Shaman and the Heresiarch:  A New Interpretation of the Li Sao:  The Li Sao is one of the long poems in the Songs of Chu, and is often interpreted to be about Qu Yuan’s problems in his career as an official. This is really interesting as it argues that the poem is mainly about spirit possession and conflict between factions of Confucians and shamans. 

Lust, Commerce, and Corruption:  An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai:  A translation of an anonymous Edo period text, which was probably by a low ranking samurai who acted as a sort of lawyer. The author is fairly conservative and upset about what he sees as the corruption of the Edo period state, especially the rise of the merchants and move to urban society. 

[rottenbrainstuff]

I noticed in the tags for one of your posts that you said Canada is heading down the same kind of path the US is. Would you mind explaining that to me? I haven't heard about that kind of thing going on but as someone who's major life goal is to move to Canada to be with her lover this sounds pretty terrifying. No pressure if you don't want to discuss that kind of thing though, I generally use Tumblr as an escape for this kind of shit so I totally understand.

Sure I can explain what I mean.This is long, guys, and I'm on mobile, so I apologize.I mean. First of all. I think I might be exaggerating a bit, our politics are always less extreme than the USA and I think they always will be. Our government is organized differently. But a lot of people, Canadians included, have this idea that Canada is this magic land of polite people and free healthcare and we're so much better than the US, and that's just really honestly not true.And I am getting worried about our political situation.First of all, Canada is not and never has been a magic perfect land where there is no racism and everyone is lovely. Our government has a shameful history dealing with indigenous people. We took entire generations of children away from their families and put them in residential schools and beat their culture out of them. We stuck them onto reserves where the conditions were terrible. There's been a huge problem with native women going missing and the police don't care, they don't devote the resources to investigating. And google starlight tours. That's a fun little thing where cops would grab a drunk native, drive them way the hell out on the highway, and just dump them off in the middle of nowhere, at night, in the winter, to let them find their way back to town in the cold. People have died from that. They deal with a ton of social issues now and there's a lot of racist sentiment against natives and it makes me want to scream, like, do you not understand, we did this to them? We broke their culture and all this shit you're complaining about is the fallout from that.We had Japanese internment camps during WW2 just like the US. After 9/11 we had a sharp increase in anti-Muslim bullshit too. There's rural areas in southern Alberta with "a proudly pro life community" signs stuck along the highway. Our government does stupid shit too. Our education didn't get gutted as bad as in the US, but my province made deep cuts to education funding in the 80s and 90s and TO THIS DAY we're still recovering from that. I just want everyone to forget this notion that we're just so much better here and all this crap can't happen here, and honestly I think it's Canadians ourselves who are the worst for this, because i think it makes us stop examining ourselves and asking questions.Which brings me to...I don't like where I see things headed. Living right next to the US, it's inevitable that we are influenced by what goes on there. I think some Canadians are really shocked by what's happening down there and it's really solidified this sense of "well I don't want THAT to happen HERE!"....But there's other things going on as well. I definitely notice a lot more racist buzz. Familiar members of mine who were just annoyingly conservative before are now blatantly and offensively islamophobic. In my province we recently had someone set fire to a mosque during evening prayer. There's graffiti and hate crimes. I do notice it getting worse.Recently we had a bit of a political shakeup, in that we got rid of Stephen Harper, a conservative premier who had been in office for a while, and elected Trudeau, who is liberal, and... despite what you might think of him, is a charismatic leader. In my province, we've had a conservative provincial government for decades, and we got so sick of it that we voted NDP in the last election, which is a worker's party, essentially, and they raised our goddamned minimum wage.And just like in the US, when you elected Obama after all the grumbling there was about Bush and there was push-back against Obama, there seems to be a conservative push-back to all of this.In Ontario they recently elected an absolute buffoon as premier, Doug Ford, and to be honest he strikes me as Trump Lite. He is related to an absolute fuckhead who used to be a mayor, Rob Ford, and whose "antics" were so ridiculous it got us international attention. Anyway this asshole Doug, he wants to do fun stuff like limit access to abortion, and roll back the minimum wage, and other bullshit like that. I thought he was too ridiculous and extreme to get elected premier, and I was wrong.A year or two ago we had a municipal election in my city, and there was concern that there was a mysterious lobby group that no one knew anything about trying to influence the election. Municipal elections are municipal! There was a gross smear campaign and people even stooped to literally sweeping the city and removing all the signage placed out by one of the candidates. Luckily it turned out the campaign didn't work and the candidates that had been targeted mostly all still won, but like. It was just so chilling to me, in the context of everything else that's been happening lately. I'd never seen anything like that happen in my city before.I hear nothing but articles about what a shitty job Trudeau is doing, first it was he was fucking us over by not pushing through this stupid goddamned pipeline, then it was that he was a liar and a traitor by eventually signing the pipeline, he's corrupt, he's a liar, all this shit. My *liberal* friends are telling me all this stuff. I'm not saying he's perfect. He's not. But here's the thing.There's been reports of concerns of Russian and Chinese involvement with our elections. I take consumer response surveys to earn money. Sometimes the surveys ask about local politics or concerns. Suddenly in the last year, the political surveys are unprofessionally biased and asking me questions about conservative politics. A fun local paper we had was recently bought by someone else and now instead of fun local stories, it's all this urgent scaremongering. FLOOD SEASON! AIRLINE STRIKE DISASTER! CITY HOUSING CRISIS!And I think about how we had the facebook data mining, I think about the Russian Tumblr accounts spreading discord to demoralize left leaning voters, and I'm worried that I'm watching the start of that. It makes me feel extremely uneasy. I think there's something going on.The Conservative party is kind of fumbling around at the moment, and I'm worried there's going to be a massive reorganization, and come next election, we're going to be looking at a racist, religious conservative candidate who wants to privatize our healthcare, limit immigration, reduce abortion access, freeze minimum wages, let oil and gas do whatever the fuck they want, etc etc etc. I'm worried it'll be a scary candidate like we've never seen before.And I'm worried that our next election will be Trudeau VS Trump 2.0, and the left-leaning voters will be split between parties, because these shadowy groups have spent a few years making everyone disagree with each other, and it will be the same thing, the exact same goddamned thing that happened in the US. "But Trudeau is so corrupt...." they'll say, and they'll split the vote, and we'll have some awful, awful shit who wants to ruin everything.Now, that's a pretty alarmist attitude, perhaps. There's certain values and certain rights we have in Canada that we're pretty passionate about, and I don't think politicians would be able to get away with as much bullshit up here as they do down there. But I don't know what's happening any more. I'm not sure of anything. Every time I think "it would never get that bad" or "people would never let that happen" something happens that proves me wrong, so. I honestly don't know. I have a really bad feeling in my gut from the weird things I see happening, I've put two and two together, and I don't like what I see.So I mean. At the end of the day, I don't think things up here will ever be as crazy as things in the US. Our government is organized a little differently, we deal with issues a little differently. But I'm still concerned. I don't like what I see, and these last two years have taught me that human beings are fucking disappointing and we don't fucking learn, from anything.I think Canada is a good place to live, and I think it will probably continue to be a good place to live. (Maybe stay away from Ontario and the prairie provinces though)There's my extremely pessimistic point of view. Probably other Canadians wouldn't tell you this, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. Message me if you have any other questions, I would love to answer them.

[tesseractj]

The Truth, and too much of it

Here we go, Fanfic 1.

 I got the prompt for this at http://imagine-loki.tumblr.com/post/153439568024/imagine-you-and-loki-are-members-of-the-avengers

 Now, I am so new to all this and I probably need to learn tons more about Tumblr, presentation, etc. I also need a PC for this. Instead, I'll let it fly. 

 Summary: OC is a long time Avenger, gets kidnapped, gets drugged, gets rescued, and shares far more of her love life with Loki than she ever wanted to. Steve and Bruce want to hide, Tony wants to listen and Loki keeps prompting for more. 

 OC and basic universe is based on a much bigger fanfic I have been working on. Basically she's a shameless self-insert, Loki is doing better and is an Avenger, and everyone actually does live together when possible creating a nice family of happy Avengers. Definite references to smut, sex, kinks and NSFW stuff. Also minor references to a nebulous past trauma. 

 .................................................. 

 The trick to this drug seemed to be to turn the stream of consciousness into a personally interesting rant. I was slowly driving my captors nuts with it. 

 They asked about Iron Man’s weaknesses and got a rant about Tony’s inability to receive a cup of cocoa when handed to him, or his habit of ordering dinner before anyone had decided what to eat or cook. The best info they gained was his favorite drinks and favorite swimsuit model. That rant lasted a good hour, broken by attempt to steer the information to their needs. 

 “Nooo, weaknesses in the his suit design!” “Like clothes? Nope, he’s got a great designer for clothes. Perfect designs.” They learned his strange clothing choices, designer apparel with $2,000 cufflinks, and then a great deal about Pepper’s awesome wardrobe. They cut me off again when I started talking about the history of the color pink and child product consumerism. 

 “No, his suit, tell us about the Iron Man suit weaknesses!” 

 “Have you seen that thing? Who thinks red is a good color for a suit? Tony freakin’ Stark. I love the guy, but any chance it could be black, brown, camo? Noooooo. Red and Gold! Not that Steve’s suit is better. Still, he didn’t design it so I give him a break there. . . usually.” That devolved into a comparison of all Avengers’ gear designs, and more embarrassingly who looked hot in what.

 They tried asking about the defences for Avenger’s Tower and the compound. I had more trouble deflecting that. I couldn’t help but start talking about FRIDAY, but once I got myself talking about the AI’s personality I was off on a rant about the comparisons between her program, the TESS program in my Neural Interface and JARVIS. TESS won that comparison, after 15 minutes of one sided discussion. 

 “What is Nick Fury’s home address?” I laughed at the likelihood of anyone knowing that answer. No one could discover his favorite coffee, let alone his home address, codes, birthday, favorite color, etc. 

 “Does Black Widow fear anything?” I got in 15 minutes about how amazing spiders are, how they are related to horseshoe crabs, how insects were the first land animals and what does Natasha have to do with sea lions? 

 “Listen up! We don’t know what another dose of this will do.” Interrogator #3 held up another vial of whatever they kept dosing me with. “We’d prefer you sane and useful, at least until we sell you and your info to the highest bidder. You are really making that hard.” 

 “Maybe the drug is no good on me? Did you test it on normal humans or genetic experiments visiting from other universes? There’s only a few of us visitors hanging around, so, I’d be pretty supri-”

 “There’s more of you?” Interrogator #1 exclaimed, looking both excited and worried at the thought. 

 I almost winced, that was more info than I wanted to share, but,”More of me? Not on this planet that’s for sure. We tend to aggravate each other outside of specialized conditions.” “More visitors fro. . . what the hell was that?”

 I was saved from accidentally revealing anything by some very loud sounds coming from somewhere not too far off. I sighed in relief. “You all are in so much trouble now. If Nat, Bruce or Loki are here you are dead meat.” Now I explained how painfully dead those three would make my captors. 

 “. . . and after the Hulk puts you through a wall Loki will pull your insides out through any hole he finds. If you haven’t died yet he’ll-” 

 “Shut up! This can’t just be the drug. You must be insane! Who says all that so cheerfully? How did you take a question about the Hulk and turn it into a lecture about Black Holes, Stars Exploding and Poles?” I grinned at the remaining guy in the room. That had been a fun stream about Gamma Ray bursts, threats to life in the universe and Magnetic Pole reversal. 

 Huh, when did the other two guys leave the room? I was knew the drug was affecting my awareness, but that was worse than I thought. Oh well, the door was flying open and I was given a second off from having to answer anything as I watched Steve stop the final guys questions. 

 My awareness hazed out for the next bit until I was breathing fresh air and realized that I was explaining to Cap how medicines for mental illness had side effects like memory loss.

 “Is she alright? Let me see her!” I heard a pleasant, if urgent, voice cut through my mental fog. 

 “Loki! I told them they’d be in big trouble if you came. I knew you would be here. Did you rip anyone to shreds? Did Nat come and break some bones?” I asked happily, likely sounding almost drunk.

 Loki looked straight into my face, eyebrows drawn in confusion. Instead of answering me he turned to Steve, who had helped walk me outside. “What has happened to her, Captain? What have they done to her?”  

“It seems they had a truth serum of some sort. We gave Bruce samples and he’s already started analysing it on the Jet. We’ll know more by the time we get home.” 

 “Know more? I’m certain I could reveal everything we need from one of the prisoners,” Loki got a dangerous glint in his eye. 

 Steve was going to raise an objection, but I couldn’t keep my mouth closed. “Awww, I know I shouldn’t, but I love the way you look when you get all dangerous and angry.”

 Loki turned back to me in concern and surprise. Before he could ask for clarification on my apparent love of his dark side I continued with more helpful information. “It’s some sort of temporary inhibition release, like a truth serum thingie mixed with ativan mixed with alcohol. They said it calms the subject(me!), reduces or rids control of mind to mouth and encourages open thinking. I really don’t think they realized what open thinking means for me. They learned a lot about my love of sciency stuff and how I adore all of you guys, verrrry little about our defences or secrets.” 

 I looked more seriously over at Steve,”I was getting really loopy at the end there. It’s worth seeing if they got a record of anything in case something important slipped. I haven’t heard TESS, since the first dose, but she might be fully operational and have a record.” Always helpful to have an AI built into your brain, or adjacent to it, or whatever Stark called it.

 I felt a hand turn my face so I would look back at Loki. “But are you alright, love? Did they hurt you?” The concern on his face sobered me up as we started walking to the Jet. My general awareness seemed to be coming back as I also noticed a SHIELD team run past about twenty feel off, and Tony was talking to someone while pointing back at the building I had been held in. The Jet was only a few hundred feet away, like a little piece of home come to get me. 

 “I’ll be fine, I think it was just a few scratches and bruises. They insisted the drug needed high doses to hurt a normal brain, and you know my physiology would handle way more than a normal human brain.” I paused to look closer at him and say,”Sorry I got kidnapped, again. I really don’t want to worry anyone, especially you.” Memories of the previous, and much worse, abduction made me shudder lightly.

 I felt his arm pull me closer to him as we started up the ramp. He seemed to take a moment to breath the scent off my hair. “It’s hardly your fault. I do wish I could keep such events from occurring. However, I would like to return to a comment you made a moment ago.” 

 I looked up at him in confusion as we settled into the seats. “You enjoy my dangerous and angry look?”

 Even in my current state I felt a blush start, “Well, yeah. You know I think you are extra sexy when you are all serious, or protective and angry. It’s not like I never told you that, right? Or, wait, no, yeah, didn’t I mention it that first time we had the silk cords and candles, whe-” 

 “Uh, Juliana, you know Bruce and I are standing right here, right?” Steve asked in a soft but mortified tone. Bruce looked like he wanted to shrink into oblivion.

 Any blush I had before was nothing compared to the the heat I felt on my face now.  No, I hadn’t even thought about who else was on the plane. It was as if everything but Loki and I had disappeared. Loki had one of his freakin’ smirks going and I knew he felt no shame. “Oh good lord, I’m so sorry Steve. Hi Bruce, sorry. Umm, thanks guys for coming to rescue me and I can’t believe. . . stop smirking Loki!” I whacked him on the shoulder. 

 Bruce tried to sound understanding,”No, it’s fine, I get it. You are under the influence, so to speak, Don’t, don’t worry about it Jay. Just glad you’re okay.”

 “Don’t worry about what?” Tony’s load steps echoed into the Jet as he came onboard. His suit was on, helmet off, and he looked curious. 

 The answer came from the cockpit, which furthered my embarrassment,”It’s nothing Tony, that’s why we don’t have to worry.” Clint had heard me too.

 Everyone should have known Tony would have none of that. Loki’s smirk became a full grin as Tony said,”Oh no, it’s something.” He looked at me appraisingly, then pointed as he figured it out,”You're still drugged and started dishing out something good. What is it? Spill.” 

 My face hit my hands as I started,”Well, I was remembering the time Loki and I-”

 “TONY, no! No taking advantage of this. Sorry Jay, you don’t have to answer,” Steve interjected before things got too far. 

 “But daaaad, it was gonna be fun!” Tony whined.

 I got to grin as I watched Tony piss off Steve, which kept up until Natasha got on board and we prepared to head home. I learned that Thor had flown off for a date as soon as he heard I was rescued. That turned out to be a very good thing, because Loki wasn’t done with his fun. 

 A few minutes after take off I was finally quiet, staring at the spot I had been lying in after me last rescue. I wanted to curse the system of balances that made pain and fear a good substitute for all the bad things I could stop. It was worth it but. . . 

 ”Surely a simple smile did not merit such a violent response,” Loki spoke up, rubbing his shoulder as if I had actually hurt him. “I would love to hear more about what you were remembering. I can’t seem to place what you were speaking of,” he sounded almost thoughtful, under his blasted smile.

 “Oh good lord, Loki! Don't think I doubt you remember that perfectly well. Green silk cords, specialty candles, those flo-” 

 “Hmmm Hrmm,” Steve coughed as I turned red again.  

“Oh great, I am still just spewing out everything in my head. How long will this last?”

 I glanced over at Bruce, who was looking very uncomfortable. “Oh, um, I don’t really know. I’ve tried to hook FRIDAY in to TESS and they are running some numbers. Let me see. . . oh, looks like 3-6 hours?”

 I gasped,”Oh no, no no, is there a sedative, yeah, sedative you can give me? I am not ready for my inner dialogue here.” 

 “Jay, Juliana, you just sat with strangers for over 7 hours under the influence. We are much safer,” Steve tried to reason. 

“First off, I don’t care what those a-holes think of me. Second off, different circumstances lead to very different answers. I was in a clinical interrogation, it was easy to stay impersonal. You all are my family, it’s personal here. Third, look at Loki’s face! He’s planning mischief!” 

 Loki put on an air of hurt innocence,”I most certainly am not!” 

 “Ugh, we all know better darling. You might be subtle, but you are trouble,” I glared, with maybe a hint of love bleeding through.

 “I could be less subtle dear, if you like. Or I could,” he leaned in, close to my ear, “ask something very subtle, like what do you want?”

 Everybody else disappeared again as my answer took over. He made things worse by skating his fingers over my neck. “I want to strip your armor off, throw you down and kiss every part of you until you-” 

 “Loki, enough! That’s enough of this!” Steve sounded half panicked, half furious. He was trying to use his Captain America voice, though it sounded just a little off. 

 “Perhaps if you and Bruce are finding this uncomfortable, you could move farther away from our conversation,” Loki offered. 

 Tony snorted at that. He was having a grand time now. This was all he wanted out of a good truth serum debacle. Steve was flustered, I was flustered but showing my kinky side, and Loki was grinning like the happiest God of Mischief in the universe.

 Loki looked back at me,”You must be hungry after everything.” 

 “Seriously, using that voice and saying that? Of course I am hungry,” I said, trying to steer my thoughts to food, chocolate, fruit, oh no. “I would love to have some chocolate and, and, and,” I tried to fight it,” annnnd I would love to lick it off of you, bit by bit. I would paint both of us in it, and then use a whole strawberry. . .”

 Steve and Bruce fled as far as they could get. Tony’s eyes went wide as he gleefully listened to my fantasy. Loki got a different look in his eyes, promising fun down the line.

 It was a few days later that I thought back and realized something quite important. Every time I had started to get overwhelmed with memories from that previous trauma, Loki would step in an distract me with stupid salacious prompts. I couldn’t decide whether or not to thank him, or if I should explain that he could have picked a less embarrassing distraction. Then I remembered that look in his eyes, and how once I got a clean bill of health we made good use of green silk cords and plenty of chocolate. Not much more needed to be said, once I thought of that.

[studying-irene]

hey everyone, i’m going to be honest here, you will never get rid of procrastination completely. unless i’m wrong, and there may be some possible way to completely get rid of procrastination. if so, i don’t think anyone has figured it out.

anywho, i’ve been procrastinating for years, so i feel like i have some decent tips on how to procrastinate less. here’s my advice!

1. focus on your discipline the most. your discipline skills are your biggest defense against procrastination. there will be times in your life where you just DON’T want to finish your essay, we’ve all been there. you need good discipline to get you in focus. stop thinking about all of those distracting concepts that pull you into procrastination, and start doing your work.

2. you need to keep the good motivation to fight procrastination. it ties along with #1, except motivation is more long term. if you want to accomplish your goals, you get the discipline needed to work for them.

3. try to find time around the day to do some work, especially at school. i do school work at lunch, and sometimes in the morning, as well as occasionally in class if i have free time, since i don’t have a study hall. it helps since it feels like you have less work to do during your normal studying times.

4. remember, doing a little bit of work for a big assignment is better than ditching it completely. if you get a project on the first day, and only manage to do 1/5 of it on that day, it really is better than not doing it at all. you might thank yourself later. try really hard to at least do ONE thing on any work you get on the first day.

5. multitask if more than one assignment correlates with another. if you have a history worksheet and a history test coming up, use the worksheet to review concepts when you need to study. i do this often, and it helps me more than just doing the worksheet. this might not help others though, and that’s fine too! if you can only focus on one thing at a time, you do your thing.

6. i cannot stress this enough, find any good time management that works for you. one popular option is the pomodoro technique (25 minutes of working with a 5-minute break. i’ve heard of other options as well, from 20 → 10, 40 → 20, and even 52 → 17. if you’re not into routines, at least take a break for 5-10 minutes whenever you feel mentally exhausted! just not every 5 minutes, trust me, that leads to procrastination after the second or third “break”.

7. use your “break” time (from #6) doing something relaxing and NOT distracting. unless you have godly discipline skills, i doubt going on your phone will cause you to get back to work properly. take a small walk, eat a snack, stretch, etc.

8. use those app/program blockers to block social media and messaging apps if you’re like me and you have severely weak discipline skills. nothing much will happen while you’re busy doing your work. if something does occur, that’s up to you to find out when you’re done with your work.

9. find a good place to actually do your work! my favorite is the library, it’s so peaceful and it gives the right setting for studying. try your best to study in the least distracting place possible. if you can’t, attempt to decrease as many distractions in your location as possible.

10. find what works for you in terms of listening to music. i personally listen to kpop, and some of us know how catchy the music can be. however, i can usually listen to kpop while doing worksheets without getting distracted. however, if i’m studying, retaking notes, reading, etc. i need ambient music (i mainly use rainymood.com!) to make me concentrate. some of us need instrumentals and/or ambient music, others can’t listen to music at all. that’s fine!

11. turn off your notifications, turn on airplane mode, put away your phone, etc. do anything that works for you. i need my phone as well as internet, so i just turn off my notifications, but not seeing any distractions might make you more likely to do your work.

12. plan things out when you get home. i personally cannot do my work first thing when i get home unlike some people, i get too mentally drained from school! i take a shower, and then eat lunch while doing my work. find out what works for you. i also cannot do the hardest assignment first to “get it out of the way”. i need a medium level assignment to prepare myself for the heavy mental work for the hard assignments!

13. as referring to #12, if one advice doesn’t work for you, don’t use it! we are all different, so if practically everyone you know can do one thing, and you’re better doing the opposite of that, just do what makes you better at productivity.

14. plan out big projects, quizzes, tests, etc. do not cram! i repeat! please! do not cram! it doesn’t feel good at all, and you’re more likely to score worse anyways. try to balance out your work/studying every day or a couple days a week with a good amount of time for all of those days. it helps your memorization more, too.

15. some say that studying in a different place once in a while helps. i personally never tried this, because my brain cares more about adaptation, but it has helped other people i know!

16. get comfortable when you study, but not too comfortable. don’t study on your bed, and please don’t study on the floor. your brain thinks of your bed as the place to sleep, so it’s best to not be on your bed often unless it’s for sleeping. for me at least, studying on the floor really kills my back. please get comfortable and find a table or desk or anything good!

17. another thing i do is that i switch assignments if i feel like i’m not focused. it helps me a lot, i would assume it lets my brain change focus to another productive activity which results in me gaining focus on something important!

18. do anything productive if you have a long break (or if you’re procrastinating haha). it gets your brain in a productive mood and it can help you focus when you go back to your work.

19. reward yourself for whatever bit of work you accomplish. my favorite rewards are my biggest distractions that i look forward to when i finish all of my work. :”)

20. take your free time away to do some extra work every once in a while. it certainly helps not to cram everything in one day.

21. please remember that it takes some, if not a lot of time to improve a habit like procrastination. you will not improve completely in one night. and sometimes, you will procrastinate, and that’s okay! just keep improving yourself, you have time.

22. if you’re looking for a reason or a sign not to procrastinate right now, this is it. tumblr can be such a distraction. you probably have something important to do. and i’m here to tell you to get back to work and finish what you need to do.

[blondrichclosetwitch]

A few weeks ago, I saw this picture in my sleep. For those that don’t know, it’s a picture of Susie cave with one of her twins, Arthur, from when he was super young. Arthur died in 2015. I believe he had taken a hit of acid and fallen off a cliff.

I saw Nick cave 3 years & 4 days ago at olive’s when my niece was adamantly telling me to go there before therapy. The minute I saw Nick, I saw the word Arthur in my mind. I gulped, tried to get up nerve to say “ hey your dead kid’s name just popped in my head, I think he wants to say hi.”..and failed miserably.

It was probably early 2020 when I saw Arthur leaning against a tree. I’d never see him inside of spaces, but I would in nature. I had screenshot the picture of him and Susie years ago, though it wasn’t til I hung it on the wall in 2020 that I understood why.

The baby can’t be called a baby anymore, but he started following me around noticeably in 2020 (btw “baby universal 97” started to play, lol). First my teacher told me he followed me in, holding onto my coat....then I took a picture at a tree and you can see his spirit. Because of apple live pictures or whatever you call them, you can actually see it moving. Then he started speaking through the playlist, where eventually he told me his name was “ouija”, which has three letters of his chosen names.

The picture of Susie & arthur suddenly became symbolic. Another time my eyes landed on a Picture of my mom with my nephew at age 4; another dishwater blond boy. Right.

Seeing the picture in my sleep was a surprise only in that I hardly ever see pictures in my sleep. I’ve dreamed of Nick & Susie a few times —-I suppose because we’ve both been heavily connected to the other side.

I heard a couple days ago to “go to the water”. I cringed; my feet are being problematic to the extent that walking an hour will make me sore. Add that with the stress of the cats, and basically I have been stressed for 48 hours, and I hate that. I hate feeling like things are out of control. Especially around special days, I like to have the space to breathe, mostly because I like to be generous & honor whatever ancestor in whatever way they prefer.

That often means going to Coney Island, a practice that started the summer of 2017. I think I promised my niece I’d take her to the water, and ever since then, it’s been our special place. Death days, anniversaries, etc. the first time I went was to bury all my necklaces, because they were swinging, and also, I thought getting rid of all swinging things would mean getting free..but no.

I didn’t know anything about anything. Sometimes my jaw hangs at my naïveté.

There were carnations and a baby bottle waiting for me in the sand today. Apparently I’m predictable in where I go. At first I thought oh no, she wouldn’t as I picked up the bottle. Spirit said otherwise. Carnations were the giveaway.

Btw; I saw the tumblr you made for me, where you keep liking & reposting my stuff. I thought about just blocking you again, but whatever.

I do think you should bury the bird you left me though.

“Sometimes I sit and think how it would be if we was married

Of if I woulda kept the child that I carried”

I remember what steel said when I was trying to decide about the baby as I waited for my laundry in Washington heights. “Whether you physically have it or not, you’ll be raising that child.” It makes me think of when stella died; I thought I had to feed her, and make sure she slept, and when she was upset because it was Halloween and she didn’t have a costume in heaven, I did everything in my power to find a solution.

Jakk I made you a tape at the ocean about this. I probably won’t send it..but I think you should think hard about this. That you don’t yell at your girlfriend when she calls you after missing her appointment because she can’t bring herself to go terminate the pregnancy.

That moment defines you for me for the rest of time.

[quirkyresources]

- ̗̀ How to Make Gifs with Photoshop and KMPlayer (Very Detailed) by quirkyresources ©  ̖́-

♡ All my tutorials ♡

Hi! I'm no expert, but I've been making gifs for at least like four or five years, and over that time I've learned a lot, so I want to share that stuff :) Also, someone requested that I teach them how to gif. I hope this helps!

This tutorial will teach you how to create simple but quality gifs, like the ones in the gifset above! Those gifs are all from TV shows, but it should apply to giffing almost anything. I’ll be using KMPlayer and Photoshop.

This is the gif I’ll be showing how to create, as an example:

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to message me here :) And I’m somewhat new to writing tutorials, so if you notice that I got something wrong, please let me know. Thanks!

Please like/reblog if this is at all useful to you. Thank you so much if you do!

You need:

KMPlayer (link below) 

Photoshop (I'm using CC 2017, but I think any version with the timeline should work) 

A video to gif (recommended source below) 

A sharpening action (recommendations below) 

A PSD / or to know how to color gifs (recommendations & tips below)

I'll go over:

How to buy/download PS, download KMPlayer, and download a video! 

Taking screencaps in KMPlayer 

Importing the screencaps into Photoshop 

Cropping and timing the gif, organizing layers, etc. 

Adding a PSD or tips for coloring it yourself 

Adding subtitles & learning font settings 

Saving for web 

Posting to Tumblr

Various tips along the way!

The tutorial is under the cut. Have fun and good luck! ♥

[Note: If a photo looks too small, right click it and choose "open in new tab"]

Step 1: getting Photoshop, KMPlayer, and quality videos

Get Photoshop: I was able to buy my Photoshop, so I don’t have any free downloads to recommend, I’m sorry! But there are plenty of other Photoshop blogs on tumblr that can help with this stuff :) And there are some deals from adobe that might help you afford it if you want to buy it instead. They had a great one for college students that totally helped me. Anyways, if you can get it somewhere/somehow, here are the next steps...

Download KMPlayer: Here's the link (it's free!): kmplayer.com You can use it to watch videos, but in this case we use it to take screencaps of them to use for gifs.

Get your video: If you’re going to download a movie or show, I recommend getting torrents from thepiratebay.org and using μTorrent to download them. (Here's a tutorial for how to download stuff with it.) Be careful with viruses and stuff, though! When you look for a video, try to get one that's as HD as you can find, meaning one that is 720p or 1080p! That tells you what the height of the frames will be, in pixels. They are usually big files, but should be much better quality than others. Also, try to find videos that do NOT have network logos or ads on them!! They can make gifs look pretty bad, and it takes some serious cropping to get rid of them, which then makes it look even less quality.

Step 2: taking your screencaps Open your video in KMPlayer. (Open KMPlayer and press CTRL O.) Get to the exact scene/clip you want to gif. (Tip: it's hard to find the exact place you're looking for, so I recommend using your right/left arrow keys to skip through a little at a time.)

Once you're at the part of the video you want to gif, press CTRL G. This brings up the "frame extraction" window. This is where, as you can probably guess, you extract the frames for your gifs! Here are the settings I use:

I use these exact settings almost every time, except for the image format section. I go between JPEG and PNG. I use JPEG if I'm making a smaller gif (like 268px width or less) and I use a PNG if I'm making a larger gif (like 540px width.) This is because (or at least I've heard) PNGs are the highest quality option, JPEGs are the middle, and bitmaps are the lowest (don't use them!!) The only downside is that the higher the quality, the higher the screencap's file size. So use PNGs sparingly if that matters to you.

You can also change the "prefix" of the screencap filenames.

After figuring out all of these settings, click "start"! Then press play on the video, play until the end of what you're giffing, and press "stop" and pause it.

Then, in the frame extraction window, click the "open" button that’s to the far right of the "extract to" bar. This will open up the folder location of your new screencaps.

Step 2.5: organizing your screencaps What you'll want to do now is organize the screencaps into separate folders for each individual gif. This is something that's good to do whether it's all from one scene or you're doing a compilation of different clips. This is because, when you upload the screencaps into PS, it's best to have them in their own little folders!

(Tip: Personally I use 75 frames or less in each gif. This is because that’s the limit on the sharpening action I use, but I also think it's a good amount to stop at.)

Step 3: importing your screencaps into Photoshop

Next, we're finally going to move the screencaps you took into Photoshop. Yay!

Open file > scripts > load files into stacks. (Tip: Sometimes this function doesn't work on certain Photoshop downloads. If this is the case for you, here's a tutorial on how to get around that!) This brings up this window:

Click "browse" and find the folder with the screencaps you want for your gif. Select all of them and click "open". Then click "ok" and wait for them to load. Each screencap will load as its own layer in the layers panel, which is what you want to start with.

Step 4: changing the screencaps from layers into frames in the timeline

Once they're all loaded as layers, go to window > timeline. This brings up the timeline!

At this point, things should look something like this:

Now we can start using the timeline! In this method we convert the layers into frames that live inside the timeline, which we’ll use to make the gif move.

First click on the button in the middle of the timeline panel that says "create frame animation" right here:

Then click on the little three bars icon on the top right corner of the timeline. Click "make frames from layers" on the thing that pops up .

It depends, but you might need to reverse the frames (if it imports them in backwards). So just click on that three bars icon again and click "reverse frames".

Step 5: cropping the gif

It's really important to know the Tumblr dimensions! If you have a gif that doesn't fit the dimensions most Tumblr users view it at it can get distorted.

So the width dimensions you should use are:

A row of just one: 540px wide 

A row of two: 268px wide each 

A row of three: 177px & 178px & 177px

A super helpful explanation of good dimensions to use is this one made by karazorel. It's very close to the way I do it.

So to crop it, go to the crop tool (duh, sorry) and enter in the dimensions you want into the area I highlighted here:

Here's what the gif looks like so far:

You'll probably notice it moves really fast and stops moving after playing once. That's because we haven't gotten to the step to fix that yet. But that's next!

Step 6: timing, looping, etc.

Timing: Select all of the frames. You can do this by selecting the first frame, holding shift, and clicking on the last frame. Now click the little arrow next to where it says "0 secs." under any of the frame previews right here:

Click on "Other..." and type "0.14" into the text field. That represents the number of seconds, or usually the fraction of a second, that each frame will play for. (It's "0.14" in this case because of the way we entered the settings in KMPlayer in the "Frames to Extract" section. The number depends on what you enter there.) Press enter/okay.

Looping: Next change the looping setting from "once" to "forever". Here's where I'm talking about:

Step 7: sharpening the gif frames

This step can either be done at this point (before coloring it) or later (right after coloring it.) I go back and forth on which is better, and different people say different things. So just play around with it!

I use this sharpening action. It can sharpen up to 75 frames, which is a really good amount in my opinion.

Once you have a sharpening action downloaded, go back to Photoshop and go to window > actions. Click this little menu button, then click "Load Actions...".

In the window that pops up, choose whatever sharpening action you downloaded and open it. This will load it into your actions panel!

Next, click the menu button on the upper right corner of the timeline panel and click "Flatten Frames Into Layers". Now there will be a new set of layers that are labeled Frame 1, Frame 2, Frame 3, etc. Keep those, and then you can delete the OLD set of layers. (That can significantly lower the file size, and it doesn’t mess anything up if you do it right!)

Now select the very first frame in the timeline, labeled "1", and select the corresponding layer, labeled "Frame 1".

Then open the sharpening action's folder within the actions panel and select the folder labeled with the number of frames you have in your gif. For example, I have 18 frames in my gif, so I selected the folder labeled "18 frames". Or at least that's the way they labeled things in the action I'm using. You may have to explore yours to figure it out.

Then click the play button on the actions panel:

Now that should have sharpened all of your frames/layers! Woohoo! Here's what the gif should look like by now, all cropped, timed, looped, and sharpened:

If this way of sharpening doesn't work for you, here are some other gif sharpening tutorials:

How to use sharpening actions in Photoshop CC by peacelovegifs 

Gif sharpening tutorial by manofsteel.co.vu 

Sharpening for Photoshop CC by completeresources 

Sharpening all gif frames at once by thosetutorials 

Sharpening masterpost by itsphotoshop

Gif sharpening action tutorial + download by themazerunnrs

Step 7.5: grouping your layers (a baby step!) A bonus step that I recommend you do is to put all your layers into a group to keep things neat. Just select all of them and press CTRL G.

Step 8: adding a PSD and/or coloring it yourself!!

Here's the fun part! Now you can let out your creativeness with the coloring. It takes a LOT of practice to get good at this, trust me. I've been doing this for YEARS and I still hate my results sometimes. But if that happens to you, too, don't let that stop you from trying again! (God, I sound like a motivational speaker or something, sorry!)

Here’s some background on PSDs for beginners, but you can totally skip this bit...

"PSD" stands for "Photoshop document", meaning a file you make or edit in Photoshop (sorry, kind of self explanatory). On Tumblr, when people talk about PSDs, they're usually referring to a document with layers that add effects (mostly adjustment layers) to a gif/photo/graphic, etc. Also referred to as a "coloring". They usually include things like brightness/contrast, vibrance, curves, selective color, etc. People post these so you can download them and use them for your own work! (Just don't repost and claim as your own. Not cool, man.)

All you have to do is download the file, open it in Photoshop, make sure you have the layers panel open (windows > layers), and drag the PSD file's window on top of your file's window, but keep them separate so you see both at once. Then drag the PSD file's group of layers (but not the background!) over to your file.

(Then you can close the PSD window.) Then on YOUR file, mess around with the adjustment layers and stuff to change it to whatever you want it to look like. I usually edit mine like crazy!

Anyways, here are what your options are. 

Finding a PSD (and then I recommend editing it to however you like it)

Here are places to find some great PSDs on Tumblr! (FYI, some are tag pages with sections for PSDs, with different types to choose from. So look around.)

QuirkyResources (Navigation) (Yup, shameless self-promo!)

QuirkyResources (My PSDs)

CompleteResources

ItsPhotoshop

ChaoticResources

YeahPS

DrunkandColoring

AresColoring

That's just a few of my favorite sources, so message me if you want more recs! :)

Coloring it yourself

I'm not going to do a full-on coloring tutorial right now, but here is my tag for those made by other people!

Basically you should learn how to use the most important adjustment layers: curves, brightness/contrast, selective color, color balance, hue/saturation, vibrance, levels, exposure, and gradient maps. At least those are the ones that I use the most and find super useful. Many of the tutorials in that coloring tutorial tag I just linked go over how to use those. So check them out!

In this case, I used my current fave PSD by dracoharry. (I’ve noticed it works on most shows I gif, so it’s super useful! I actually used it for all of the gifs in the gifset I made for this post.)

Here are the layers I kept hidden/showing:

FYI, I changed the layers' settings and whatnot a bunch.

And here’s what my result was:

Step 9: adding text & learning font settings (optional)

This is usually when I add text to the gif, if relevant.

There are various fonts and settings you can use for this, but to make things easier, here's a font PSD by adorkablelena. It’s for subtitles/quotes. I recently started using it. It's really cute! If you're not into it though, here's my tag for other font PSDs you can check out.

When you find a font PSD you like, open it and drag it into your document the same way you would with a regular PSD.

Select the text tool and replace the text with your quote. (Tip: Try not to misquote or misspell things if you can help it! I've done it and it sucks when that happens. Ugh.)

As far as colors go... For the primary quote I make the text white, and the secondary quote I usually make it yellow (#ffde00). And if there is a third I'll use some shade of orange, and anything after that I just use whatever I can make look the best. The stroke color I use varies sometimes, but I usually use black (#000000).

Finally, select the move tool (V) and make sure "smart guides" are turned on. To check this, go to view > show > smart guides, and make sure it's checked. Now when you drag around the text (select its layer first), you can see little purple vertical/horizontal guides pop up when you drag the text to the center of either direction. For the subtitle we're making, we want it to be centered horizontally and close to the bottom of the gif, but not too close. Also, if you have more than one line of text, just press enter somewhere in the text that splits it into similar-sized lines. Here's an example of all of this stuff put together:

Step 10: saving for web

There are a lot of settings to remember and play around with when saving for web, and specifically for Tumblr. 

First, go to file > export > save for web (legacy).

Here you'll see a lot of settings to choose from, but they're not as intimidating as they may look!

Here are my usual settings:

Red highlight: There are multiple options in the top drop down list in the area I highlighted that are good to use. I usually use “Adaptive”, but “Perceptual” and “Selective” are good options too. In my experience, the rest make your gif look pretty gross. For the drop down list under that I choose "Pattern". This arranges the pixels in a pattern, and I like the look of that more than the two other viable options, ”Diffusion” and “Noise”.

Orange highlight: This is where you choose the number of color shades that are in the gif. I use the top amount allowed, 256, because this achieves the highest quality possible! If you need to make the gif's file size smaller, you can lower this amount, but I don't recommend it. If it's a B&W gif you can sometimes get away with using less and have it still look just as quality.

Yellow highlight: Looping options: Forever. Very important! Like I showed earlier, you can also set this setting before you get to the "save for web" option. Either way, this makes it so the gif loops forever.

Green highlight: Gif size! As I mentioned earlier, there is a limit for Tumblr. This example is a pretty small gif (592.9K) and the current file size limit on Tumblr is 3MB. Tumblr seems to change this limit a lot though, so you may want to look that up once in awhile to stay up to date.

Turquoise highlight: Always check the box next to “Convert to sRGB”. I just learned that this setting is important. It basically keeps the vibrance intact when you take it from Photoshop to Tumblr. Read a much better explanation here! :)

Then just click "Save...", choose the file location, and press "Save" again.

Step 11: uploading/posting to Tumblr

Now, last but not least, it's time to upload it to Tumblr! I probably don’t need to explain this, but I’m going to anyways. It's super-duper easy. Just go to your dashboard and click on this button:

Then the post creation window pops up, and just go on from there. Upload your images/gifs, drag them around to arrange them however you like, and add a caption if you want.

(Tip: Don't forget to add tags! It's super important to add tags if you want people to actually find your post. Only the first 5 tags show up in the main Tumblr tag-search results (ugh wtf, right?) but sometimes the other ones you add will show up on the general search page. I don't really get how to explain it or how it works tbh, sorry! But I do know that many fandoms have developed their own tagging-language to find people's posts more easily (and avoid spam) which is very useful once you figure it out. For example, if I was posting a gifset of Cheryl Blossom from Riverdale, I'd tag it with things like "riverdaleedit" and "cherylblossomedit" and maybe "madelainepetschedit". So basically the name of the show/character/actor/ship plus "edit", no spaces. Or an abbreviation of any of those, like "spnedit" or "dwinchesteredit". I hope that at least makes a little sense? As far as the amount of tags that will show up on individual blogs, I'm not positive, but I believe you can use up to 30. After that the post won't appear on the tag's page. Grrr.)

Then, of course, just post it! I recommend saving it as a draft and then posting it at a time when a lot of people are likely to be on Tumblr. (There's research done on this timing!)

THE END! :D

I really hope that was at least somewhat helpful. Sorry if it was annoying that I went into sooo much detail, I just thought I should explain everything so it would make sense to most people, especially total beginners. Again, if anyone has any questions at all, you can absolutely ask me here! Or let me know if you think I got anything wrong, I would definitely want to fix it! Thanks for reading, and please like/reblog ♥ I’d really appretiate it!

[mcrmadness]

I’m really tired and going to sleep very soon, but at the same time I’m super curious about this whole MCR reunion concert - and because I live in Europe, it will begin around 7am Finland time. And that is waaaaaay (lol) too early for me, especially as I’m just going to sleep and it’s already 3:30am here.

But yeah, the old MCR fangirl is still somewhere in me. And right now, as I’m going to sleep, I started to crave for a new MCR t-shirt. I guess I have to get one sooner or later. I already have 2 old ones in my closet I think? But since I was 15 and then 20 when I bought those, they do not fit me anymore. And the 2011 shirt that I bought from the the second concert in Finland (I was to their first in 2007 too, I didn’t buy anything but I got Frank’s signature!) is women’s shirt anyway and I no longer use them because they are uncomfortable af. But I also still have my first MCR merch ever (if not counting the cds etc.) aka my Shredded hoodie jacket. TBP merch which we ordered with my mom back in 2007, and it came all the way from the USA :D I was 16 but for some reason that hoodie jacket still fits me! But I haven’t been using it for years, it has some holes here and there, so it’s also literally “shredded”, and even tho I still love that hoodie, it it’s kinda weird one because I always link that to my 16-years-old self who used that hoodie like 24/7 :D But idk, maybe I will wear it again tomorrow, just for fun?

Oh and by the way, I just realized. Around these days was my 13th anniversary of becoming a MCR fan. I can’t understand how it’s possible but yup, that’s right. And I’m not exactly sure which day it was... might have even been 18th December 2006 when I finally gave up and gave them a listen? Anyway, I was really bad with music before that, only being “loyal” to just one band and I was annoyed because MCR was EVERYWHERE and I didn’t get away from it and I felt like, I HAVE TO give them a chance so they will then leave me alone. But nope, I actually started liking them. A lot. And I’m also one of those who started using the slogan “MCR saved my life” because I was going through a really rough time back then. I was bullied and hated in school - that’s why “I’m Not Okay” video spoke to me A LOT, I think that one was pretty much THE one to me. As I got TBP songs + only that song from the earlier stuff.

(If you’re interested in my story about how MCR has always been super important to me and how they have helped with my mental health issues, you can click the Read more link below.)

So yeah, it’s bit of a clichë and everything but the video really spoke to me, it felt like I had just looked into a mirror. Except that we don’t have high schools in Finland but you know. Anyway, I started to have mental breakdowns because of school and started skipping school days, and feeling bad conscience for doing so. And I had already had severe social anxiety since I was 11 or so; and that just got worse and worse every year. And then during the last class I started having just regular anxiety/depression/whatsoever symptoms from all the loneliness and because I felt like teachers were too demanding, I tried to be the best I could which was not enough for me so I started underachieving and that made me get even more depressed and hate myself for not being good enough at school, and then I gave up about school altogether because I just couldn’t sleep at night because I was so afraid of dying in my sleep, I was obsessed with listening to my heart but trying to find a spot where I don’t feel it and then getting anxious because I found a position where I didn’t feel it and needed to start feeling it so I knew I was still alive. So going to sleep was horrifying, and whenever I woke up, that whole heart thing started over and I couldn’t fall asleep anymore. So I just got up and cried because I didn’t want to go to school, and stayed at home. And then so many times I saw Welcome to the Black Parade on TV and heard it from the radio and it was everywhere all the time. And I actually felt that MCR did not leave me alone because I needed them but I didn’t know that yet? It was weird :D

And they helped me to get through all that shit - I actually was to a psych ward for a full week which was the best thing that could have happened to me. In a way, at least. I finally could sleep and I promised to go back to school if I can go back home. And they agreed so I went back to school and actually was able to finish all the courses and pass all the exams and so my 9 years of hell called school was finally over. But my mental health got back on its tracks only about 1,5 years later when I was 17 and started eating antidepressants. Until that I did not know I was not okay yet because I made myself believe so because I didn’t want to go back to the psych ward. But I started to get feels of that depression thingy again in 2008 and I felt so so so terrible that I just decided this needs to end now but like, for me that end was “Hell, I could even start with the antidepressants, I can’t take this anymore” so that happened then. And I quit the meds in 2013 finally. I still have anxiety and other fancy accessories that come along with it but I’ve pretty much learned to live with it instead of trying to get rid of it. It’s still a part of me and the way my brains function and it’s just so much easier to deal with it when you just let it live its own life, listen to yourself and accept that we all just aren’t neurotypical and that’s okay.

But what I was saying was that MCR has always been really important for me with this topic because they have always been so open about these things so every time I was struggling with my anxiety or bullying or whatever, I always just thought to myself “The guys from MCR have got through all that shit too, and so will I!” and it just gave me hope that it IS possible to overcome anxiety or depression etc. I’m still slightly socially anxious but it’s better than what it used to be, and I have generalized anxiety disorder but it’s okay, I have better days and worse days but so far my anxiety hasn’t killed me so I’m still fine. It actually helps me to think to myself “it’s only in my head” because somehow it just makes sense and makes the anxiety smaller - sometimes - when I think it’s just the chemicals in my brains being fucked up :D On the worst days nothing makes sense of course and every anxiety feels so real and can’t talk sense to it, but I’ve still always got over the worse days too. And I haven’t been depressive in ages but sometimes I’m bit afraid of that anyway, because it left me with traumas basically, but I still believe that because I have been through some sort of depressive episode(s) in the past, I can recognize MY symptoms in time and I can get myself help if that happens.

This was now some random-ass opening up but as if that would be something new for me lol. Just had to be nostalgic for a moment, can’t wait for tomorrow to see what happens during the concert! I browsed some tweets and Tumblr posts and those soundchecks and everything are just so uncanny. I still can’t really comprehend that the day is actually today :D

[katranga]

Disclaimer: Fic is just for fun. Nobody on ao3, or tumblr, or wherever, is expecting perfection. Most of these tips are gonna take a little extra time and effort to implement, and if you don’t feel like doing that, because you just wanna post the darn thing? Go for it! I’m not here to tell you what to do, and I’m certainly not saying that your writing is bad if you don’t follow these tips. These are just suggestions that will hopefully help you improve your work, if that’s what you’re after.

Intro: Why Revise?

To kick things off, I’d like to go over the importance of revision!! This is more of a general writing tip, but it’s a great starting point, because I DON’T want you to be thinking about most of my future tips while you’re writing the first draft. 

I want you to get. those. words. on. the. page! That’s all you should be worried about when you’ve got a blank page staring you in the face. 

There’s so much pressure to get writing right the first time, but I’m here to tell you that’s pretty much impossible. So, pressure’s off! Just write the basics so you get to know your story first. I

I know it seems like writing it perfectly will save you editing/revising time later on, but you can’t revise—let alone post—what you don’t have written because you’re stuck on one line that doesn’t sound just right. You with me so far? Great!

Honestly, writing gets so much faster when you remind yourself that no one is going to see your first draft!

So I cannot overstate the importance of revision.

Because guess what? Everything you don’t like about your first draft can be fixed in revision!

Okay. What is it?

To clarify, when I say first draft, I don’t mean the stuff you do in high school, where you write out a shitty essay on paper first and then type it up basically the same, just to prove to the teacher you wrote a first draft?? Or whatever.

I mean you just write the absolute basics of your story down, and fill in the rest and perfect it later (I’ll go into detail about how exactly to do that in my motivation post).

Now, grammar, spelling, and overall readability, are all important things to fix before you post. But that’s little stuff, and your word processor will be able to pick up on some of that, and just rewording a few sentences to make them clearer probably won’t take too much effort on your end (though I am gonna have a post about filler words and clarity and stuff like that, so if that tends to be a problem for you, I gotchu).

Besides basic grammar/spelling, most of what I change as my first draft transforms into my second or third is: 

Improving the flow of a scene (it can’t all be dialogue, unfortunately)

Pacing throughout the fic (are they falling love too fast? is this scene too long? etc)

Overall clarity (I know why the character did that, but will the reader?)

It may be different for you. Basically, you’re polishing up whatever you didn’t worry about writing the first draft.

My first drafts, for example? They’re 80% dialogue. Because that’s my favourite! And that’s what comes to me when I’m dreaming up fics. But then I go back later and beef up the rest—the characters’ movements in a scene, their inner dialogue, description etc.

Because as much as I love dialogue, scenes feel empty and too-fast with just characters talking. Similarly, scenes can feel bogged down and slow with just characters thinking about things.

But revision isn’t just about adding things! Sometimes you need to take stuff out. Inner dialogue that later gets covered by dialogue? Cut it. (Or vice versa—maybe the detail isn’t important enough for the characters to talk about, and just the mention of it within the narration is enough).

The point is, repetition needs to go. The reader rarely needs to be told the same thing twice.

Quick example from the top of my head:

Lance had lost his jacket. He’d looked over the whole castle for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. His brother gave him that jacket. One of his last ties to Earth, and it was missing in action.

Maybe Keith took it to spite him, that jerk.

“What’s up, Lance?” Hunk asked when he passed him in the hall.

“I lost my jacket!” Lance said. “My signature jacket, the one Marco gave me! I’ve looked everywhere, but it’s gone. Do you think Keith stole it?”

Same information twice: Lance can’t find his brother’s jacket despite a thorough search, and suspects Keith stole it. No reason to repeat that. Something’s gotta go.

I know cutting stuff isn’t fun. You worked hard on that! You spent hours/days/whatever perfecting a sentence until it gleamed like a diamond, and now just because you thought of a better way to get that information across you have to get rid of it? No way!

I’ve been there, trust me. But hanging on just slows down the whole writing process. Because, for me at least, I know when stuff needs to go, or needs a massive overhaul, or whatever. I’m just digging my heels in because I don’t wanna do any additional work.

Luckily, this is where your shitty first draft comes in handy! If all you did was spit words onto the page as soon as they entered your head, then you didn’t spend a lot of back-breaking effort on whatever you need to cut! And what you need to cut isn’t anything awe-inspiring, it’s just your rough notes, so tossing it aside isn’t nearly as stressful!

Remember, you can always save scenes/dialogue/etc in a separate document! Maybe you’ll be able to salvage some it later. Alternatively, create separate versions of the doc as you edit/revise. If you end up actually needing part of a deleted scene, you’ve still got it somewhere!

And please, never think of the stuff you cut (or fics you never finished) as “wasted time”. Writing time is never wasted! You’re practicing, you’re honing your craft, and even if some bits never see the light of day, you’re still benefitting from all that work you did!

Now, I know I know I know most people edit/revise as they write. Can’t think of the next scene? Reread the previous scene and fiddle with it until something comes to you. That’s great! Revising already written material is loads better than just staring at your screen!

BUT I’ve recently started writing the whole gosh darn diddly thing without looking back and that is so much faster! While I highly recommend it, that’s obviously difficult to do when you don’t know what’s going to happen next in the fic.

Or if you just don’t have the motivation. So! That’ll be our next topic: Getting words on the page!

But for now, I’ve got an example under the cut, as well as additional resources and links if you want to learn more about revision!

Here’s where I take an old embarrassing fic of mine and revise it, hopefully clarifying the points I’ve been making, as well as proving that only practice makes better!

Okay so this is an excerpt of one of my unpublished fics from 2011. I’m just gonna be honest with you here, it was a Twilight human!AU where Edward was a massive nerd. 

For background, Bella has been at the new school like a week and is appalled at the bullying happening to Edward, who she barely knows. (It’s first person bc that’s how the books were written. Just deal with it.)

Here we go:

“They gave him a swirly yesterday,” I announced, appalled.

“Who?”

“Edward!”

Jessica shrugged, unaffected. “Nothing new.”

“Well what are they, twelve?” I demanded angrily.

“He kind of needed a hair wash,” Mike muttered.

Snorts of amusement followed.

“Stuffing his head into a toilet is not funny,” I argued.

“Yes it is, Bella,” Alice chuckled.

“Kay, next time we go to the bathroom, I’ll shove your head into a toilet,” I offered. “And we’ll all laugh about it.”

This was a whole scene, I kid you not. Now, this isn’t bad because it’s just dialogue. It’s ten lines. That’s a reasonable amount of space for a quick dialogue exchange. HOWEVER, there’s about four people in this scene, so the dialogue tags are a little sparse. ALSO, this is the first time Bella’s bringing her concerns about Edward to the group, so there should be more inner reflection on that.

Overall, it’s just way too minimalist lol. So  this is a good example to beef up.

First of all: where the fuck are we? Notice how no setting was given? Not the greatest habit to get into. If it’s already been established in the fic where people are, and the setting’s not that important, I guess you can skip it, but a quick mention isn’t gonna hurt. You don’t want the reader confused!

Since this a Twilight fic, let’s say they’re in the caf. (In Voltron fics, you’re probably gonna be on the ship, but you can always mention what room they’re in. Or, if it’s a new planet, give a line or two of description).

Explanations for changes I made are in [square brackets]:

I tossed my lunch tray onto the table before throwing myself onto the chair next to Alice. “They gave him a swirly yesterday.”

[Indicated setting. Also implied she was feeling “appalled” using verbs instead of outright stating it. Showing not telling!]

Across from me, Angela looked up from the sandwich she was picking at. “Who?”

[Indicated who was speaking—always important—as well as gave brief description of speaker].

“Edward,” I said like it should be obvious. I scanned the cafeteria for him, but the corner he usually sat in alone was empty.

[Another mention of setting. Also backed up her concern for Edward with action and not just talking about him].

Jessica shrugged, unaffected. “So what?”

“So?” I repeated incredulously.

So I’d never heard of someone actually getting a swirly. In real life. Shitty teen dramas? Yeah. Actual high school? No. It was ridiculous, and gross, and… I hadn’t seen anything to indicate Edward deserved it. (Nobody who’d ever deserved a swirly had ever received one, I was sure).

[The almighty character motivation! Note that you don’t actually have to explicitly state why they’re doing something—obviously we as the reader know the deep-down motivation is because Bella cares for Edward. But characters are not always forthcoming with information, even to themselves. Right now she’s focusing on the unjustness of the situation, and partially trying to convince herself that’s all it is].

Mike slung an arm across the back of Jessica’s chair, snorting a laugh. “He needed to wash his hair, anyway.”

“A toilet’s not gonna do that, Mike!”

[Just a cleverer response. Also, a dialogue tag isn’t needed, because no other speaker at the table is gonna be defending Edward. We know it’s Bella.]

He ignored my glare, choosing instead to steal a fry off my plate. I smacked his hand away.

[Again—action. The characters aren’t just static in their seats.]

“Well, really,” Alice began. “What’s it matter?” She sat up sharply, an idea just now occurring to her. “You haven’t been making friends with him, have you? I told you, Bella, it’s social suicide!”

[Gives Alice a chance to respond to Bella’s outburst—in this AU Alice is very concerned with popularity and does not want Bella associating with Edward. She would definitely have a problem with Bella sympathizing with Edward.]

I rolled my eyes. “No, I just…”

The whole situation was ridiculous. This wasn’t how people should be treated. Was I the only one who realized that? Was I really the only one who cared?

“Whatever,” I grumbled, crunching down on a fry.

[This feels like a more natural resolution to the conversation. Alice directly asks why Bella cares, and Bella reiterates to herself it’s just because. And then decides it’s not worth the argument. This is 2k into an (unfinished) 30k fic. She’ll make a bigger deal out of stuff later.]

Now it looks more like a real scene! 

So, to summarize, I added: Description—both setting and character! Character musing! Cleverer comebacks! 

These are just some of the things that you can fix with a keen-eyed round of revision.

--

And that about wraps this up! I didn’t want this to get too long, but it did anyway. (I’m sorry about the graphics I’m a writer, not a graphic designer. But I had to split the post up so it wasn’t one big block of text)

Was any of that helpful? Was it too long? Did the example clarify things? Let me know, I wanna make sure these tips are helpful!

--

Additional Resources That I Highly Recommend:

DRAFTING: THE THEORY OF SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS -- This post probably explains shitty first drafts better than I ever could! If you still have concerns about it, definitely check it out.

Editing & Revision Answerathon -- Okay, this video is pretty long, but I looove Max Kirin for anything writing-related and especially revision!! They’ve got a tumblr and a Youtube account filled with writing tips! If you like getting your writing info through videos, definitely check out their stuff.

Top 5 Writing Tips: Revision -- Here’s an infographic by Max if you don’t want to watch a 44 minute video lol. Also, you can go through their /tagged/revision for more!

[tylerbiard]

Facebook -- TMI

I never got into Facebook when it was new and trendy, circa 2007.  I didn’t have a need for it.  I just watched from the sidelines as my peers slowly migrated from Nexopia (which I also didn’t use) to it.  It wasn’t until after high school that I could’ve seen a use for it, but by that time, Facebook had already peaked in (youth) popularity, and I was increasingly aware of its more negative aspects, especially as someone who even then was critical of increased proliferation of texting and social media.  I didn’t want to become addicted to it, I didn’t want to play Farmville, and as a photographer, I didn’t like how Facebook keeps the right to use your images for whatever purpose they so desire (which isn’t unique to Facebook).

I would regularly get asked about why I didn’t have Facebook, which was increasingly obnoxious, and I knew there were certain social aspects that I was missing out on, so I caved in 2015.  Now it’s been going on two years and I’m left wondering what all the fuss was over.  Don’t get me wrong -- there are a lot of cool features to Facebook.  But I’ve never found such an anxiety-inducing amalgam of banality.  I often consider pulling the plug and deleting my account, but I always stop just short, instead deactivating as a more pragmatic approach.

I think a lot of my anxiety with Facebook stem from one thing specifically, and that’s just the amount of information Facebook presents to you.  It’s too much.  It’s overly personal, too, due to the way the platform is set up.  It’s also the type of information Facebook gives you, which is often of the lowest common denominator variety, partially due to the platform itself, partially due to the user base and how they use it. 

Now, to be clear, I realize I came to Facebook late, and know there once was a reason young people flocked to it.  But once everyone and their grandma jumped on board, it became an awkward family dinner party.  I completely understand the rise of Snapchat as a reaction against the familial, curated juggernaut that is Facebook for young people.  Kids want to be kids without having to worry who will see what they liked, and don’t necessarily want to share always-manicured stuff for Instagram.

One of the more obvious issues with Facebook is clickbait.  Probably due to clientele and sheer size, Facebook, like no other social network, is synonymous with it.  Instagram doesn’t even allow links in an effort to cut down spam and clickbait.  I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been tempted by catchy, vapid articles, but at the end of the day, there is no way I’m going to actually need to know 10 surprising things I didn’t know a jellyfish could do.  I live in a landlocked province, BuzzFeed!  Clickbait is the type of thing that makes you unproductive at whatever you should be doing without actually gaining anything meaningful.  You may as well trudge through Wikipedia articles instead and gain insight.

A nicer Facebook feature is that you can hook up other social accounts for easy cross-posting.  But it comes at a price.  For the way Tumblr is configured to connect with Facebook, not only does it let you cross-post Tumblr posts to Facebook, but for some reason, it allows Facebook to keep a tally of everything you like or share on Tumblr.  Just a bit creepy.  This doesn’t happen with Instagram or Twitter.

As previously mentioned, I often pragmatically just deactivate my Facebook account whenever I feel overwhelmed by it.  Whenever you do this, Facebook pulls a guilt trip on you saying “X friend will miss you.”  Very nice.  Perhaps this isn’t overtly information overload, but it’s still kinda lame, and adds another deranged wing to the platform. The “friends” are either someone who won’t actually miss me, because we don’t actually talk anyways, or it’s someone who can get ahold of me through other means, including, amazingly enough, Facebook Messenger!

Although I find Messenger nice enough to not deactivate it, it is clearly sadistic in some ways.  For example the right pane (on browser), constantly notifying you who is on Facebook and when they were last on Facebook.  Through that, it’s easy to start picking out who spends too much time on Facebook, and notice habits in when people are on.  These are things I don’t want to know and should only be valuable to stalkers in almost all cases.  So why is it there?  But the real vile part of it is the Read notifications.  And not only does this show you that someone has viewed your message, Messenger also tells you exactly when.  There are many articles dealing with “left on read”, but I’ll just say the whole thing, while a nice idea, should just be abolished.  It is a terrible situation for both parties. For the receiver of a message, it creates unnecessary pressure to respond, as the clock starts ticking once you’ve opened the message, when you may simply have opened by accident or are trying to figure out a response.  Or you just don’t have anything to say.  It’s even worse for the sender, who sees their message read, and then just left.  It creates this self-loathing anxiety encircling the notion that your message isn’t important and that your “friend” doesn’t care about what you have to say.  Which isn’t necessarily the case, either.   These features create an environment where people get anxious, analyze the hell out of things, in the process making assumptions, putting pressure, and so forth, and it’s all just not healthy.  We really don’t need to be informed the time that a message was read, nor do we need to know when someone was last online, nor any of this.  As someone who’s dealt with both ends of these issues, I think it’s best to keep Messenger as an augmented version of texting (not iMessage) in the right ways (eg stickers, customizing, group chats, etc).  

The bulk of Facebook’s information overload aspects come more from the personal side of things.  Some of this is literally the posting behaviour of members.  Like, I don’t actually care what Gilmore Girl you’re most like.  I mean, to each their own, but I don’t really get why it has to be shared.  Every.  Time.  It’s spammy.  And I know people whose profiles are just endless “test” results.  I admit, sometimes they can be interesting, but the lowest common denominator variety rarely are, unless ironically (so hipster!). I think that’s the crux of it too; the banal, lowest common denominator drivel runs amok on Facebook in a way you don’t find elsewhere.  It’s all very underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time.  Yet for some reason I still log back in.  It baffles me sometimes, to be honest.

On top of that, Facebook likes to show that “X friend liked/commented on this”.  Most times, I don’t care.  Other times, it might be interesting, but I have no desire to interact with the post (which is presumably why Facebook does this) because it’s a post by a random friend-of-a-friend, whom I’ve never met.  I’m not going to like or comment in that situation.  It’d be weird. It’d be awkward.  It’s the kind of thing that makes people desire to be very selective with what they like on Facebook because it may show up in someone’s feed, without that someone even looking for it.  And because of the more personal (i.e. familial) nature of Facebook, it makes it doubly awkward.  Personally, this isn’t an issue for me, but it’s still obnoxious. 

Also, unlike Instagram, Facebook seems to serve as a photo dump for every photo from a night out to be posted.  It really is just a waste of bandwidth to post two near-identical photos, side by side.  I get that there is a less-rigourously-curated nature to Facebook, but c’mon.  It makes the feed far less enticing to peruse.  I guess there’s the unfollow option in these cases.  More to the point, is that for some reason so many Facebook users (myself included) felt obligated to add people that they really have no interest in just to be “nice”.  Usually it’s relatives, but it can be acquaintances or randos you met somewhere, sometime.  It really makes Facebook that awkward dinner party I pointed to earlier.  Often times, it’s perceived to be too awkward to unfriend, while others go through regular culls.  For the former group, though, it dilutes the feed with stuff people aren’t interested in from people they aren’t interested in, which is why young people have flooded Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat.

But why not just delete it at that point?  I’ve heard rumblings that many younger teens now don’t bother with Facebook, but once you’ve got it, it seems odd to get rid of it.  It’s still a highly used platform, so it’s very, very useful for engaging with people.  It’s great for groups, for events, and of course, more personal stuff.  Facebook is a walled garden, and provided you set your posts not to public, it can allow you to be more real about things, provided you don’t have to worry about random aunts and acquaintances seeing it (or don’t care).  It isn’t always a presentation of your best self, and in some ways that can be liberating.  It’s candid.  I like that.  For the people I genuinely care about keeping up with, Facebook is a fabulously personal platform.  But there’s also just a lot of bullshit on Facebook, including sometimes from those you do care about keeping up with, which makes Snapchat more and more enticing for “who cares” posting.  If only most of my friends actually used it!  Maybe I just need to unfriend a bunch of randos that I don’t really have in my life.  But there’s still the systematic issues with the platform that wouldn’t be resolved in such a scenario. 

For now, Facebook just feels like a taxing, necessary evil.  I’m growing kinda tired of social media and smartphones in general, so maybe one day I’ll pull the plug.  For now, I’m merely becoming distant to alleviate myself from the more toxic and creepy elements of Facebook, so that I can still reap the benefits of the platform.  Hopefully it works.

There’s probably more I could’ve gone into here, but does anyone else feel similarly about Facebook as a platform of “TMI”?   Anyone else feel stuck with it due to the broad nature of the platform?

[perelka-l]

code lyoko, pokemon, scp, wtnv

bruh.

1. Code Lyoko

How I entered/learned about the said game/show/movie/etc of that fandom:

I was a bored kid who still had a TV in a room and watched stuff and everybody I knew liked CL so I watched it a lot. And then I kind of forgot about it and returned when I randomly started to doodle during geography lesson in high school and went on random google search and what do you mean live action

Fave character

XANA. I’d say William and Aelita and Odd too but XANA is always the best. Though I admit, Odd was a fav when I was a kid.

Least fave character

Season 4 Odd and Sissi I’m so upset those characters have been made into such one-dimensional shadows of old characters.....

OTP(s)

XANAWill, Jerlita, poly willulumi... also franz/anthea go fuck yourself evolution

Pairing that everyone likes but I don’t get

Why the heck is WillOdd so popular? It’s my casual bewilderment at entire “pair the spares” thingamajig that so many people have going on.

Fave thing about the fandom

Idk when evo was going on it was lovely to see all theories running wild and meta from 2nd season being reread over and over again and it was lovely I think

The most despised thing

forehead jokes stopped being funny ten years ago

If there is something I would change from said game/show/movie/etc., what would it be.

stop one dimensionalism being played up harder and harder starting from s!3, get rid of most of writers of Evo. I’m cool with everything else I think. Don’t give me solutions to theories, please, I love when we still have this mystery going on.

2. Pokemon

How I entered/learned about the said game/show/movie/etc of that fandom

Damn I genuinely can’t remember... I used to collect cards in primary school though but what brought me now to this, I’m not sure...

Fave character

Least fave character

OTP(s)

Pairing that everyone likes but I don’t get

...I.... I’m sorry but amount of characters that exist here.... don’t do this to me....... please....

Fave thing about the fandom

it’s so big and parts I encountered are so friendly and I made friends and there is always amazing content being created and there is always discussion going on I really like it

The most despised thing

nothing comes to my mind now really

If there is something I would change from said game/show/movie/etc., what would it be.

don’t do this to me.

3. SCP

ok this one I got asked like three times while I was writing everything above. wow. 

How I entered/learned about the said game/show/movie/etc of that fandom

I think it was a random post on tumblr that mentioned SCP, I saved it to read later, went on website, remembered I have matura exams to pass and went back to it after said exam. And started reading.

Fave character

Oh boy. I love a lot of characters. This is my post in which I list out my favourite SCPs. Also, I love researchers (Gears! Clef! Glass! Everyone!) and all dem GOI peeps (WONDERTAINMENT!!! AWCY!! I LOVE UIU!!!!!!!!!) I LOVE CHURCH OF THE BROKEN GOD i love a lot of guys ok

Least fave character

I.... can’t understand fixation on 076-2 like..... I get that he’s cool but please...... i don’t understand...... 

OTP(s)

IceGears, ClockworkFlesh, Clefdraki, Ion/Bumaro, also Redd/Wondertainment family is my tiny guilty pleasure. also, Pico Ruiz/corpses. But that’s almost canon.

Pairing that everyone likes but I don’t get

.....i can see appeal of able/cain but it’s everywhere.......

Fave thing about the fandom

People are so creative!!!! So many different ideas!!! So many different approaches to one thing!!!!!! THERE IS NO CANON.

The most despised thing

I left fandom after some tales went to side that I just... I plainly disliked the direction ok. Sorry guys, I still love you a lot. There is also one more thing but I don’t want to talk about it.

If there is something I would change from said game/show/movie/etc., what would it be.

eh, nowadays I’m staying away from SCP bc Pokemon is consuming my life but! I wish if one day I’ll come back bc I’m still too damn curious for my own good there will be even more amazing stuff that I won’t ever find time to read because holy shit amount of stuff written..........

4. WTNV

How I entered/learned about the said game/show/movie/etc of that fandom

I heard the soundtrack! I listen to a lot of fanmixes and I hear Disparition’s music and oh this is what people are talking about...

Fave character

I still think fondly about Kevin and Apache Tracker

Least fave character

Tamika Flynn maybe. I never liked her a lot.

OTP(s)

Remember when I wrote Apache Tracker/Man in the Tan Jacket fanfic? Good times. Cecilos was cool when it was still in vague territory and didn’t make me want to vomit. Oh yeah also Brownstone Spire/Glowing Cloud.

Pairing that everyone likes but I don’t get

eh

Fave thing about the fandom

I loved mysterious atmosphere of the show, I liked how I thought I could create limitlessly, this world was perfect to do whatever, the music was lovely....

The most despised thing

If there is something I would change from said game/show/movie/etc., what would it be.

The fandom itself. One too many times one can be called racist because of way I imagine a character or because of what character I like. WTNV as a show also changed, for much worse. Even after abandoning fandom I listened to eps but I couldn’t stand the romo, couldn’t stand voices given to characters, how gentle mysteries turned into each episode being turned into some intense events resolved by Power Of Love. I miss hooded figures. I even miss the old soundtrack. I miss Night Vale but it will never come back.

whew that was long.

[2libras]

My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically, Johanna Hedva

1.

In late 2014, I was sick with a chronic condition that, about every 12 to 18 months, gets bad enough to render me, for about five months each time, unable to walk, drive, do my job, sometimes speak or understand language, take a bath without assistance, and leave the bed. This particular flare coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, which I would have attended unremittingly, had I been able to. I live one block away from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino neighborhood and one colloquially understood to be the place where many immigrants begin their American lives. The park, then, is not surprisingly one of the most active places of protest in the city.

I listened to the sounds of the marches as they drifted up to my window. Attached to the bed, I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.

I started to think about what modes of protest are afforded to sick people – it seemed to me that many for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service, might not be able to be present for the marches because they were imprisoned by a job, the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or literal incarceration, and of course the threat of violence and police brutality – but also because of illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability.

I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight.

If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.

In my graduate program, Arendt was a kind of god, and so I was trained to think that her definition of the political was radically liberating. Of course, I can see that it was, in its own way, in its time (the late 1950s): in one fell swoop she got rid of the need for infrastructures of law, the democratic process of voting, the reliance on individuals who’ve accumulated the power to affect policy – she got rid of the need for policy at all. All of these had been required for an action to be considered political and visible as such. No, Arendt said, just get your body into the street, and bam: political.

There are two failures here, though. The first is her reliance on a “public” – which requires a private, a binary between visible and invisible space. This meant that whatever takes place in private is not political. So, you can beat your wife in private and it doesn’t matter, for instance. You can send private emails containing racial slurs, but since they weren’t “meant for the public,” you are somehow not racist. Arendt was worried that if everything can be considered political, then nothing will be, which is why she divided the space into one that is political and one that is not. But for the sake of this anxiety, she chose to sacrifice whole groups of people, to continue to banish them to invisibility and political irrelevance. She chose to keep them out of the public sphere. I’m not the first to take Arendt to task for this. The failure of Arendt’s political was immediately exposed in the civil rights activism and feminism of the 1960s and 70s. “The personal is political” can also be read as saying “the private is political.” Because of course, everything you do in private is political: who you have sex with, how long your showers are, if you have access to clean water for a shower at all, and so on.

There is another problem too. As Judith Butler put it in her 2015 lecture, “Vulnerability and Resistance,” Arendt failed to account for who is allowed in to the public space, of who’s in charge of the public. Or, more specifically, who’s in charge of who gets in. Butler says that there is always one thing true about a public demonstration: the police are already there, or they are coming. This resonates with frightening force when considering the context of Black Lives Matter. The inevitability of violence at a demonstration – especially a demonstration that emerged to insist upon the importance of bodies who’ve been violently un-cared for – ensures that a certain amount of people won’t, because they can’t, show up. Couple this with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities that keep people in bed and at home, and we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them – which means they are not able to be visible as political activists.

There was a Tumblr post that came across my dash during these weeks of protest, that said something to the effect of: “shout out to all the disabled people, sick people, people with PTSD, anxiety, etc., who can’t protest in the streets with us tonight. Your voices are heard and valued, and with us.” Heart. Reblog.

So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

2.

I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure.

And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch.

I’ve come to think about chronic illness in other ways.

Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression, in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses. Cvetkovich continues: “Most medical literature tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface.” In other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea.

Let me quote Starhawk, in the preface to the new edition of her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: “Psychologists have constructed a myth – that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.” I’d here supplant the word “psychologists” with “white supremacy,” “doctors,” “your boss,” “neoliberalism,” “heteronormativity,” and “America.”

There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’”

What the article does not mention is race – which leads me to believe that the writer and his wife are white. Whiteness is what allows for such oblivious neutrality: it is the premise of blankness, the presumption of the universal. (Studies have shown that white people will listen to other white people when talking about race, far more openly than they will to a person of color. As someone who is white-passing, let me address white people directly: look at my white face and listen up.)

The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I don’t mean to diminish Rachel’s horrible experience – I myself once had to wait ten hours in an ER to be diagnosed with a burst ovarian cyst – I only wish to point out the presumptions upon which her horror relies: that our vulnerability should be seen and honored, and that we should all receive care, quickly and in a way that “respects the autonomy of the patient,” as the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics puts it. Of course, these presumptions are what we all should have. But we must ask the question of who is allowed to have them. In whom does society substantiate such beliefs? And in whom does society enforce the opposite?

Compare Rachel’s experience at the hands of the medical establishment with that of Kam Brock’s. In September 2014, Brock, a 32-year-old black woman, born in Jamaica and living in New York City, was driving a BMW when she was pulled over by the police. They accused her of driving under the influence of marijuana, and though her behavior and their search of her car yielded nothing to support this, they nevertheless impounded her car. According to a lawsuit brought against the City of New York and Harlem Hospital by Brock, when Brock appeared the next day to retrieve her car she was arrested by the police for behaving in a way that she calls “emotional,” and involuntarily hospitalized in the Harlem Hospital psych ward. (As someone who has also been involuntarily hospitalized for behaving “too” emotionally, this story feels like a rip of recognition through my brain.) The doctors thought she was “delusional” and suffering from bipolar disorder, because she claimed that Obama followed her on twitter – which was true, but which the medical staff failed to confirm. She was then held for eight days, forcibly injected with sedatives, made to ingest psychiatric medication, attend group therapy, and stripped. The medical records of the hospital – obtained by her lawyers – bear this out: the “master treatment plan” for Brock’s stay reads, “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.” It notes her “inability to test reality.” Upon her release, she was given a bill for $13,637.10.

The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.”

3.

Before I can speak of the “sick woman” in all of her many guises, I must first speak as an individual, and address you from my particular location.

I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my “illness.”

Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction, sexual trauma, and hepatitis from a dirty needle, and to this day remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Or, that I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, raised in an environment of poverty, addiction, and violence, and have been estranged from my parents for 13 years. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor – according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) – which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps it can be encapsulated in the word “trauma.” Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck.

It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it.

So, here is what has come to me:

Endometriosis, which is a disease of the uterus where the uterine lining grows where it shouldn’t – in the pelvic area mostly, but also anywhere, the legs, abdomen, even the head. It causes chronic pain; gastrointestinal chaos; epic, monstrous bleeding; in some cases, cancer; and means that I have miscarried, can’t have children, and have several surgeries to look forward to. When I explained the disease to a friend who didn’t know about it, she exclaimed: “So your whole body is a uterus!” That’s one way of looking at it, yes. (Imagine what the Ancient Greek doctors – the fathers of the theory of the “wandering womb” – would say about that.) It means that every month, those rogue uterine cells that have implanted themselves throughout my body, “obey their nature and bleed,” to quote fellow endo warrior Hilary Mantel. This causes cysts, which eventually burst, leaving behind bundles of dead tissue like the debris of little bombs.

Bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and depersonalization disorder have also come to me. This means that I live between this world and another one, one created by my own brain that has ceased to be contained by a discrete concept of “self.” Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations. I have been hospitalized, voluntarily and involuntarily, because of it, and one of the medications I was prescribed once nearly killed me – it produces a rare side effect where one’s skin falls off. Another cost $800 a month – I only took it because my doctor slipped me free samples. If I want to be able to hold a job – which this world has decided I ought to be able to do – I must take an anti-psychotic medication daily that causes short-term memory loss and drooling, among other sexy side effects. These visitors have also brought their friends: nervous breakdowns, mental collapses, or whatever you want to call them, three times in my life. I’m certain they will be guests in my house again. They have motivated attempts at suicide (most of them while dissociated) more than a dozen times, the first one when I was nine years old. That first attempt didn’t work, only because after taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, I somehow woke up the next day and went to school, like nothing had happened. I told no one about it, until my first psychiatric evaluation in my mid 20s.

Finally, an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named. As Carolyn Lazard has written about her experiences with autoimmune diseases: “Autoimmune disorders are difficult to diagnose. For ankylosing spondylitis, the average time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is eight to twelve years. I was lucky; I only had to wait one year.” Names like “MS,” “fibromyalgia,” and others that I can’t remember have fallen from the mouths of my doctors – but my insurance won’t cover the tests, nor is there a specialist in my insurance plan within one hundred miles of my home. I don’t have enough space here – will I ever? – to describe what living with an autoimmune disease is like. I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illnesses, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally. The worst symptom that mine brings is chronic shingles. For ten years I’ve gotten shingles in the same place on my back, so that I now have nerve damage there, which results in a ceaseless, searing pain on the skin and a dull, burning ache in the bones. Despite taking daily medication that is supposed to “suppress” the shingles virus, I still get them – they are my canaries in the coalmine, the harbingers of at least three weeks to be spent in bed.

My acupuncturist described it as a little demon steaming black smoke, frothing around, nestling into my bones.

4.

With all of these visitors, I started writing Sick Woman Theory as a way to survive in a reality that I find unbearable, and as a way to bear witness to a self that does not feel like it can possibly be “mine.”

The early instigation for the project of “Sick Woman Theory,” and how it inherited its name, came from a few sources. One was in response to Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory,” which proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up. Another was incited by reading Kate Zambreno’s fantastic Heroines, and feeling an itch to fuck with the concept of “heroism” at all, and so I wanted to propose a figure with traditionally anti-heroic qualities – namely illness, idleness, and inaction – as capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory. Another was from the 1973 feminist book Complaints and Disorders, which differentiates between the “sick woman” of the white upper class, and the “sickening women” of the non-white working class.

Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing.

I offer this as a call to arms and a testimony of recognition. I hope that my thoughts can provide articulation and resonance, as well as tools of survival and resilience.

And for those of you who are not chronically ill or disabled, Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy this way. To face us, to listen, to see.

5.

Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick.  

To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. But more than anything, I’m inspired to use the word “woman” because I saw this year how it can still be radical to be a woman in the 21st century. I use it to honor a dear friend of mine who came out as genderfluid last year. For her, what mattered the most was to be able to call herself a “woman,” to use the pronouns “she/her.” She didn’t want surgery or hormones; she loved her body and her big dick and didn’t want to change it – she only wanted the word. That the word itself can be an empowerment is the spirit in which Sick Woman Theory is named.

The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else.

The Sick Woman is anyone who does not have this guarantee of care.

The Sick Woman is told that, to this society, her care, even her survival, does not matter.

The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible.

The Sick Woman is a black trans woman having panic attacks while using a public restroom, in fear of the violence awaiting her.

The Sick Woman is the child of parents whose indigenous histories have been erased, who suffers from the trauma of generations of colonization and violence.

The Sick Woman is a homeless person, especially one with any kind of disease and no access to treatment, and whose only access to mental-health care is a 72-hour hold in the county hospital.

The Sick Woman is a mentally ill black woman whose family called the police for help because she was suffering an episode, and who was murdered in police custody, and whose story was denied by everyone operating under white supremacy. Her name is Tanesha Anderson.

The Sick Woman is a 50-year-old gay man who was raped as a teenager and has remained silent and shamed, believing that men can’t be raped.

The Sick Woman is a disabled person who couldn’t go to the lecture on disability rights because it was held in a venue without accessibility.

The Sick Woman is a white woman with chronic illness rooted in sexual trauma who must take painkillers in order to get out of bed.

The Sick Woman is a straight man with depression who’s been medicated (managed) since early adolescence and now struggles to work the 60 hours per week that his job demands.

The Sick Woman is someone diagnosed with a chronic illness, whose family and friends continually tell them they should exercise more.

The Sick Woman is a queer woman of color whose activism, intellect, rage, and depression are seen by white society as unlikeable attributes of her personality.

The Sick Woman is a black man killed in police custody, and officially said to have severed his own spine. His name is Freddie Gray.

The Sick Woman is a veteran suffering from PTSD on the months-long waiting list to see a doctor at the VA.

The Sick Woman is a single mother, illegally emigrated to the “land of the free,” shuffling between three jobs in order to feed her family, and finding it harder and harder to breathe.

The Sick Woman is the refugee.

The Sick Woman is the abused child.

The Sick Woman is the person with autism whom the world is trying to “cure.”

The Sick Woman is the starving.

The Sick Woman is the dying.

And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself.

Why?

Because to stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care – its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die.

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.

Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal.

Here’s an exercise: go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.”

Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.    

6.

I used to think that the most anti-capitalist gestures left had to do with love, particularly love poetry: to write a love poem and give it to the one you desired, seemed to me a radical resistance. But now I see I was wrong.

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.

This text is adapted from the lecture, “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically,” delivered at Human Resources, sponsored by the Women’s Center for Creative Work, in Los Angeles, on October 7, 2015. The video is here.​

Recommended Texts

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Berkowitz, Amy. Tender Points. Oakland: Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015.

Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Brown, Stephen Rex. “Woman Held in Psych Ward over Obama Twitter Claim.” NY Daily News. March 23, 2015.

Butler, Judith. “Vulnerability and Resistance.” REDCAT. December 19, 2014.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Complaints and Disorders; the Sexual Politics of Sickness. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973.

Fassler, Joe. “How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously.” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2003.

Halberstam, Jack. “Zombie Humanism at the End of the World.” Lecture, Weak Resistance: Everyday Struggles and the Politics of Failure, ICI Berlin, May 27, 2015.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Hedva, Johanna. “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically.” Lecture, Human Resources, Los Angeles, October 7, 2015.

Lazard, Carolyn. “How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.” The Cluster Mag. January 16, 2013.

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Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Special ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997.

Mantel, Hilary. “Every Part of My Body Hurt.” The Guardian, June 7, 2004.

Miserandino, Christine. “The Spoon Theory Written by Christine Miserandino.” But You Dont Look Sick: Support for Those with Invisible Illness or Chronic Illness. April 25, 2013.

Rich, Adrienne. “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” In Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

Salek, Yasi. “Audrey Wollen on Sad Girl Theory.” CULTIST ZINE. June 19, 2014.

Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, & Politics. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

Thurman, Judith. “A Loss for Words: Can a Dying Language Be Saved?” The New Yorker, March 30, 2015.

Vankin, Jonathan. “Kam Brock: The Reason They Threw Her In A Mental Ward Was Crazy — What Happened Next Was Even Crazier.” The Inquisitr News. March 24, 2015.

Zambreno, Kate. Heroines. Semiotext(e) / Active Agents, 2012.

Watch: Event presented by the Women's Center for Creative Work at Human Resources on October 7, 2015